A proposed synthesis method for Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors. Issue 3 (March 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Horváth, Péter; Hosszú, Gábor; Kovács, Ferenc
• Is Part Of: Microelectronics journal. Volume 46:Issue 3(2015)
• Page Start: 237
• Page End: 247
• Publication Date: 2015-03
• Subjects: Microelectronics -- Periodicals; Microélectronique -- Périodiques; Microelectronics; Electronic journals; Journals - contents and abstracts; Periodicals; 621.3805
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mejo.2015.01.001
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0959-8324

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="author" id="ab0005"> <title id="sect0005">Abstract</title> <sec> <p id="sp0075">Due to the rapid technology advancement in integrated circuit era, the need for the high computation performance together with increasing complexity and manufacturing costs has raised the demand for high-performance configurable designs; therefore, the Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors (ASIPs) are widely used in SoC design. The automated generation of software tools for ASIPs is a commonly used technique, but the automated hardware model generation is less frequently applied in terms of final RTL implementations. Contrary to this, the final register-transfer level models are usually created, at least partly, manually. This paper presents a novel approach for automated hardware model generation for ASIPs. The new solution is based on a novel abstract ASIP model and a modeling language (Algorithmic Microarchitecture Description Language, AMDL) optimized for this architecture model. The proposed AMDL-based pre-synthesis method is based on a set of pre-defined VHDL implementation schemes, which ensure the qualities of the automatically generated register-transfer level models in terms of resource requirement and operation frequency. The design framework implementing the algorithms required by the synthesis method is also presented.</p> </sec> </abstract>