Dual-pipeline heterogeneous ASIP design

Abstract

We demonstrate the feasibility of a dual pipeline application specific instruction set processor. We take a C program and create a target instruction set by compiling to a basic instruction set from which some instructions are merged, while others discarded. Based on the target instruction set, parallelism of the application program is analyzed and two unique instruction sets are generated for a heterogeneous dual-pipeline processor. The dual pipe processor is created by making two unique ASIPs (VHDL descriptions) utilizing the ASIP-Meister Tool Suite, and fusing the two VHDL descriptions to construct a dual pipeline processor. Our results show that in comparison to the single pipeline application specific instruction set processor, the performance improves by 27.6% and switching activity reduces by 6.1% for a number of benchmarks. These improvements come at the cost of increased area which for benchmarks considered is 16.7% on average.