Customized SIMD unit synthesis for system on programmable chip - a foundation for HW/SW partitioning with vectorization

Use of single instruction multiple data (SIMD) functional units enables multimedia systems to exploit parallelism to a higher degree resulting in significant system performance improvements. While implementation of whole SIMD system functionality for an application results in wastage of area resources, we have observed that for a specific multimedia application, we only need to implement a customized SIMD unit that is a subset of whole SIMD standard implementation. Based on this study, we have proposed an extension to the traditional system design and synthesis flow by integrating a methodology of SIMD unit synthesis. Our system synthesizes a customized SIMD unit along with an extended instruction set and generates an equivalent version of assembly code for the application using the extended instruction set. The results of area and performance obtained by experimenting over our implementation of AltiVec compatible customized SIMD units show the effectiveness of our approach.