Dynamically utilizing computation accelerators for extensible processors in a software approach

Abstract

In recent years, it is increasingly common to see using application specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) in embedded system designs. These ASIPs can offer the ability of customizing hardware computation accelerators for an application domain. Along with instruction set extensions (ISEs), the customized accelerators can significantly improve the performance of embedded processors, which has already been exemplified in previous research work and industrial products. However, these accelerators in ASIPs can only accelerate the applications that are compiled with ISEs. Those applications compiled without ISEs can not benefit from the hardware accelerators at all. In this paper, we propose using software dynamic binary translation to overcome this problem, i.e. dynamically utilizing the accelerators. Unlike a static approach, dynamically utilizing accelerator poses many new problems. This paper comprehensively explores the techniques and design choices for solving these problems, and demonstrates the effectiveness by the results of experiments.