Vector processing as a soft-core CPU accelerator

The currently accepted method of accelerating applications in FPGA soft processor systems is to design a custom hardware accelerator. This paper suggests the alternative approach of adding a vector processing core to the soft processor as a general-purpose accelerator. The approach has the benefit of a purely software-oriented development model. With no hardware design experience needed, a software programmer can make area-versus-performance tradeoffs by scaling the number of functional units or vector lanes. This paper shows that a vector processing architecture maps efficiently into an FPGA and provides a scalable amount of performance for a reasonable amount of area. Three configurations of the soft vector processor with different performance levels are estimated to achieve scalable speedup ranging from 3

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: FPGA
• Authors: Jason Yu, Guy Lemieux, Christopher Eagleston
• Keywords: FPGA, FPGA 2008, FPGA Soft Processor, Soft Processor, Vector Processing