An 8-way VLIW embedded multimedia processor with advanced cache mechanism

An 8-way VLIW embedded multimedia processor is developed in 0.11 μm 7-layer Cu/Al metal CMOS process technology. The processor achieved the peak performance of 2132 MIPS/2.1 GFLOPS/4.26 GOPS at 533 MHz. This processor equips 4-way integer and 4-way floating/media pipelines. Each media pipeline can execute a 4-parallel SIMD instruction, so 16-operations can be executed at a cycle. It also equips the data and instruction caches, and each of their size is 32 KB. The data cache has a non-aligned data access mechanism and an enhanced store operation mechanism, and a 9% performance improvement was verified. The instruction cache has a reconfigurable associativity mechanism, and achieved more than 12% of power consumption decrease. As a result, this processor achieved more than twice the performance over our previous processor. This processor enables MPEG2 MP@ML 2-stream decoding.