Architecture synthesis of high-performance application-specific processors

  • Authors:
  • Mauricio Breternitz, Jr.;John Paul Shen

  • Affiliations:
  • SRC-CMU CAD Center, ECE Dept, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;SRC-CMU CAD Center, ECE Dept, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • DAC '90 Proceedings of the 27th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
  • Year:
  • 1991

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Abstract

The key principles of the Application-Specific Processor Design (ASPD) methodology include: a semi-custom 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 an 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.