Custom Processor Core Construction from C Code

—In this paper we present a method for construction of application specific processor cores from a given C code. Our approach consists of three phases. We start by quantifying the properties of the C code in terms of operation types, available parallelism and other metrics. We then create an initial data path to exploit the available parallelism. We then apply designer guided constraints to an interactive data path refinement algorithm that attempts to reduce the number of the most expensive components while meeting the constraints. Our experimental results show that our technique scales very well with the size of the C code. We demonstrate the efficiency of our technique on wide range of applications, from standard academic benchmarks to industrial size examples like the MP3 decoder. Each processor core was constructed and refined in under a minute, allowing the designer to explore several different configurations in much less time than needed for manual design. On average, the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SASP
• Authors: Jelena Trajkovic, Daniel D. Gajski
• Keywords: Available Parallelism, Data Path, Hardware, Processor Core, SASP 2008