Automatic exploration of VLIW processor architectures from a designer´s experience based specification

This paper presents a new synthesis approach for dedicated systems. The aim of the synthesis scheme is to achieve can automatic exploration of VLIW processor architectures from a pure C description of the input system. The innovation consists of the fact that unit allocation must manage the fact that a function may be realized either by dedicated functional units or by a set of lower-level efficiently controlled functional units. For example, execution of a square root function can be accomplished in two ways: either by a dedicated functional unit or by an oriented software implementation of Newton´s iterations. The aim is to find the best global trade-off between all the candidate architectures. In order to illustrate this synthesis scheme, we give an example issued on a sonar application