Details:

Title	Automatic Instruction Set Extension and Utilization for Embedded Processors
Author(s)	Giovanni De Micheli, Paolo Ienne, Armita Peymandoust, Laura Pozzi
Type	Technical Report, Misc
Abstract	There is a growing demand for application-specific embedded processors in system-on-a-chip designs. Current tools and design methodologies often require designers to manually specialize the processor based on an application. Moreover, the use of the new complex instructions added to the processor is often left to designers' ingenuity. In this paper, we present a solution that automatically groups dataflow operations in the application software as potential new complex instructions. The set of possible instructions is then automatically used for code generation combined with high-level arithmetic optimizations using symbolic algebra. Symbolic arithmetic manipulations provide a novel and effective method for instruction selection that is necessary due to complexity of the automatically identified instructions. We have used our methodology to automatically add new instructions to Tensilica processors for a set of examples. Our results show that our tools improve designers productivity and efficiently specialize an embedded processor for the given application such that the execution time is greatly improved.
Length	12
File
Language	English
Year	2003
Month	June
Translation	No
Refereed	No
Conferencename	IEEE 14th International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors