Fast, quasi-optimal, and pipelined instruction-set extensions

Nowadays many customised embedded processors offer the possibility of speeding up an application by implementing it using application-specific functional units (AFUs). However, the AFUs must satisfy certain constraints in terms of read and write ports between AFU and processor register file. Due to these restrictions the size and complexity of AFUs remain small. However, in recent some work has been done on relaxing the register file port constraints by serialising register file access (i.e., by allowing multi cycle read and write). This makes the problem of selecting best AFU significantly more complex. Most previous approaches use a two staged process to solve this problem, i.e., first selecting AFUs under some higher I/O constraints and then serialise them under the actual register file port constraints. Not only these methods are complex but also lead to suboptimal solutions. In this paper we formulate the AFU selection problem as an integer linear programming and solve it optimally. We show experimentally that our methodology produces significantly better results compared to state of art techniques.