A new multithreaded architecture supporting direct execution of Esterel

Authors:
Simon Yuan;Li Hsien Yoong;Sidharta Andalam;Partha S. Roop;Zoran Salcic
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Venue:
EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems
Year:
2009

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Abstract

We propose a fully pipelined, multithreaded, reactive processor called STARPro for direct execution of Esterel. STARPro provides native support for Esterel threads and their scheduling. In addition, it also natively supports Esterel's preemption constructs, instructions for signal manipulation, and a notion of logical ticks for synchronous execution. In addition to the reactive processors, we propose a new intermediate format called unrolled concurrent control-flow graph with surface and depth (UCCFGsd) that closely resembles the Esterel source. A compiler, based on UCCFGsd, has been developed for code generation. We have synthesized STARPro and have carried out a range of benchmarking experiments. Experimental results reveal substantial improvement in performance and code size compared to software compilers. We also excel in comparison to recent reactive architectures, by achieving an average speed-up of 37% in worst-case reaction times and a speed-up of 38% in average-case reaction times. This has been achieved by utilizing fewer hardware resources, while incurring an average code size increase of 40%.