An evaluation system for application specific architectures

Application specific architectures are assuming an important role in the design of tailored systems as they enable a better cost/performance ratio, by exploiting application intrinsic features, with respect to standard components. An ASA design environment has been developed in order to allow the evaluation of different architecture solutions in terms of cost and performance. The system deals with parallel synchronous non-homogeneous architectures and, starting from the high-level description of the application benchmarks, reaches code generation and simulation of architectures whose description can range from simple timing organization to detailed data-path and instruction structures. As an application example, the system is applied to the comparison of pipelined and parallel micro-architecture organizations for floating-point processing