Design of CAD ASIP for JIT extensible processor: Case study on PathFinder routing algorithm

Just-In-Time (JIT) Extensible Processor is the most flexible platform among others reconfigurable computing platforms. In this platform all computing intensive kernels can be translated to bitstream by embedded CAD processor to be executed on hardware part. Executing CAD algorithms on embedded processor is a time-consuming task and normally is not feasible for real user applications. In this paper, the design of an application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) has been proposed as a promising solution to speed up the execution time of CAD algorithm used in JIT extensible processor. The proposed ASIP is customized for routing which is one of most time consuming phases. Simplescalar simulator toolset is used to provide high flexible performance processor architecture and adding new extracted instruction set and customized register file and memory to processor. Regarding this specification, we achieved 10X speedup for routing phases.