ρ-VEX: A reconfigurable and extensible softcore VLIW processor

This paper presents the architectural design of a reconfigurable and extensible very long instruction word (VLIW) processor. In addition to architectural extensibility, our processor also supports reconfigurable operations. Furthermore, we present an application development framework to optimally exploit the freedom of reconfigurable operations. Because our processor is based on the VEX ISA, we already have a good compiler which is able to deal with ISA extensibility and reconfigurable operations. Our results show that different configurations of our processor lead to considerable cycle count reductions for a selected benchmark application.