INSIDE: INstruction Selection/Identification & Design Exploration for extensible processors

This paper presents the INSIDE system that rapidly searches the design space for extensible processors, given area and performance constraints of an embedded application, while minimizing the design turn-around-time. Our system consists of a) a methodology to determine which code segments are most suited for implementation as a set of extensible instructions, b) a heuristic algorithm to select pre-configured extensible processors as well as extensible instructions (library), and c) an estimation tool which rapidly estimates the performance of an application on a generated extensible processor. By selecting the right combination of a processor core plus extensible instructions, we achieve a performance increase on average of 2.03x (up to 7x) compared to the base processor core at a minimum hardware overhead of 25% on average.