A novel JAVA processor for embedded devices

  • Authors:

  • Yiyu Tan;Chihang Yau;Kaiman Lo;Paklun Mok;Anthony S. Fong

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • SAMOS'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded Computer Systems: architectures, Modeling, and Simulation
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

As a result of its object-oriented (OO) feature and corresponding advantages of security, robustness and platform independence, Java is widely applied in embedded devices. However, among current solutions to Java execution engine implemented by software or hardware, the overheads of executing OO related bytecodes are costly and have a great impacts on the overall performance of Java applications, especially in embedded devices, where real-time operations and low power consumptions are required in the case of limited memory. To solve this problem, a novel Java processor architecture called jHISC is proposed where the OO related bytecodes are supported in hardware directly. In jHISC, an object is represented by the hardware-readable data structure -object context, which then makes it possible to implement complex OO related bytecodes at hardware level and access some fields of object in parallel to improve the execution speed. It mainly targets J2ME and implements about 93% bytecodes and 83% OO related bytecodes in hardware directly, and the OO related operations are executed much faster in jHISC than by software traps.