Using Java optimized processor as an intellectual property core beside a RISC processor in FPGA

Abstract

Advances in computer technology have made this technology part of everyone's daily life. This in turn has created a demand for various applications to run on different machines. Java programming language was introduced to address this demand. However, to execute the Java programs, the computers must have a machine, called Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that translates its generic codes to machine-specific instructions. Traditionally, JVMs have been implemented in software. This is primarily due to the inherent flexibility of software. However, software JVMs often suffer from their lower speed and memory overhead. Consequently, some efforts have been put into hardware implementations of a JVM. These hardware implementations were not safe from those problems as well. In this paper, a new architecture for hardware implementation of Java Virtual Machine is proposed. This architecture mitigates the problems that hardware implementations of Java Virtual Machine typically have. The proposed architecture is appropriate for designers who use FPGAs as their development platform, or use IP cores in their designs.