Instruction folding in a hardware-translation based java virtual machine

Bytecode hardware-translation improves the performance of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with small hardware resource and complexity overhead. Instruction folding is a technique to further improve the performance of a JVM by reducing the redundancy in the stack-based instruction execution. However, the variable instruction length of the Java bytecode makes the folding logic complex. In this paper, we propose a folding scheme with reduced hardware complexity and evaluate its performance. For seven benchmark cases, the proposed scheme folded 6.6% to 37.1% of the bytecodes which correspond to 84.2% to 102% of the PicoJava-II's performance.