Application-specific customisation of multi-threaded soft processors

Author

Dimond, R. ; Mencer, O. ; Luk, W.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput., Imperial Coll., London, UK

Volume

153

Issue

3

fYear

2006

fDate

5/2/2006 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

173

Lastpage

180

Abstract

A multi-threaded microprocessor with a customisable instruction set, CUStomisable Threaded ARchitecture (CUSTARD), is proposed. CUSTARD features include design space exploration and a compiler for automatic selection of custom instructions. Custom instructions, optimised for a specific application, accelerate frequently performed computations by implementing them as dedicated hardware. Field programmable gate array implementations of CUSTARD are evaluated using media and cryptography benchmarks, and commercial MicroBlaze processor is compared. As low as 28% area overhead for four interleaved threads and up to 355% speedup over a processor without custom instructions are demonstrated.

Keywords

cryptography; field programmable gate arrays; instruction sets; microprocessor chips; multi-threading; FPGA implementation; MicroBlaze processor; automatic selection; cryptography benchmark; custom instruction; customisable instruction set; customisable threaded architecture; dedicated hardware; design space exploration; field programmable gate array; interleaved thread; media benchmark; multithreaded microprocessor; multithreaded soft processor;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers and Digital Techniques, IEE Proceedings -

Publisher

iet

ISSN

1350-2387

Type

jour

DOI

10.1049/ip-cdt:20050177

Filename

1626509