Architecture synthesis of high-performance application-specific processors

Abstract

An automated approach, called architecture synthesis, for designing application-specific processors is presented. The key principles of the application-specific processor design (ASPD) methodology include: a semicustom compilation-driven design/implementation approach, the exploitation of fine-grained parallelism for high performance, and the adaptation of datapath topology to the data transfers required by the application. The powerful microcode compilation techniques of percolation scheduling and pipeline scheduling extract and enhance the parallelism in the application object code to generate all optimized specification of the target processor. Implementation optimization is performed to allocate functional units and register files. Graph-coloring algorithms minimize the amount of hardware needed to exploit available parallelism. Data memory employs an organization with multiple banks. Compilation techniques are used to allocate data over the memory banks to enhance parallel access.<>