Design of heterogenous multi-processor embedded systems: applying functional pipelining

Practice shows that increasing the amount of instruction level parallelism (ILP) offered by an architecture (like adding instruction slots to VLIW instructions) does not necessary lead to significant performance gains. Instead, high hardware costs and inefficient use of this hardware may occur. Mapping embedded applications onto multiprocessor systems forms a very interesting extension to ILP. The authors describe their approach to the mapping of embedded programs written in ANSI C onto a pipeline of application specific processors. An efficient algorithm for functional pipelining of loops is presented. To validate its applicability the frequency tracking system is used as a case study. This typical embedded application is mapped onto a two-processor system delivering speedup of 1.88 in comparison with a highly optimized single core solution.