Instruction-set architecture exploration strategies for deeply clustered VLIW ASIPs

Instruction-set architecture exploration for clustered VLIW processors is a very complex problem. Most of the existing exploration methods are hand-crafted and time consuming. This paper presents and compares several methods for automating this exploration. We propose and discuss a two-phase method which can quickly explore many different architectures and experimentally demonstrate that this method is capable of automatically achieving a 50% improvement on the energy-delay product cost of an automatically generated architecture for an ECG detection application and a 1% energy-delay product cost improvement compared to a hand-crafted design.