Phase coupled operation assignment for VLIW processors with distributed register files

• Authors: Marco Bekooij;Jochen Jess;Jef van Meerbergen
• Venue: Proceedings of the 14th international symposium on Systems synthesis
• Year: 2001

The ever increasing complexity of signal processing applications and the desire to reduce the time to market demands efficient compilation techniques for programmable Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). Because the instruction sets of VLIW processors are more regular and orthogonal then the instruction sets of the traditional DSPs, they tend to be more compiler friendly. However in order to improve the maximal clock frequency, the power efficiency and the code density, several register files are used in the newer generation of VLIW processors instead of just one large register file. The use of several register files and partial connected networks leads, for example, to the problem that a result stored in a register file can not be accessed by all the functional units in the processor. This makes the assignment of operations to functional units a difficult task for the compiler.This paper describes the constraint analysis based operation assignment techniques intended to deal with processors with distributed register files and partially connected networks. The assignment techniques have been implemented in our code generation tool FACTS [8]. This tool is intended for the generation of an operation assignment, a register binding and a schedule of folded loops that satisfy the specified timing constraints. Our approach is based on satisfaction of constraints which makes it different from the optimisation based operation assignment techniques [4][2][3] which are known from literature. The operation assignment technique is based on the modeling of the assignment search space in a conflict graph. Pruning of this conflict graph prevents decisions that inevitably lead to solutions that do not satisfy the timing constraints. If after pruning infeasibility is detected, backtracking of assignment decisions is performed. In order to obtain a tight coupling between the assignment phase and the schedule phase information is derived from the conflict graph which is used to prune the schedule search space and information from the schedule search space is incorporated in the conflict graph. Automatic insertion of copy operations for moving intermediate values from one register file to another register files is not supported. However the use of a shared global bus in the processor guarantees that at least one direct communication path from a producing functional unit to a consuming functional unit exists and therefore the use of copy operations is not necessary.