PRISC software acceleration techniques

Programmable reduced instruction set computers (PRISC) are a new class of computers which can offer a programmable functional unit (PFU) in the context of a RISC datapath. PRISC create application-specific instructions to accelerate the performance for a particular application. Our previous work has demonstrated that peephole optimizations in a compiler can utilize PFU resources to accelerate the performance of general purpose programs. However these compiler optimizations are limited by the structure of the input source code. This work generalizes on our previous work, and demonstrates that the performance of general abstract data types such as short-set vectors, hash tables, and finite state machines is significantly accelerated (250%-500%) by using PFU resources. Thus, a wide variety of end-user applications can be specifically designed to use PFU resources to accelerate performance. Results from applications in the domain of computer-aided design (CAD) are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of our techniques