Conjoining soft-core FPGA processors

Soft-core programmable processors on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be custom synthesized to instantiate only those hardware units, such as multipliers and floating-point units, that an application requires to meet performance demands, thus minimizing soft-core size on the FPGA. Conjoining processors, meaning to share hardware units among two or more processors, can further reduce soft-core size, leaving more resources for other circuits such as custom coprocessors. Using Xilinx MicroBlaze coprocessors and standard embedded system benchmarks, we show that conjoining two processors can provide 16% processor size reductions on average, with less than 1% cycle count overhead. We introduce an efficient dynamic-programming-based exploration method to find the best custom instantiation of hardware units, considering both standalone and conjoined options, for soft-core processors. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.3 [Special-Purpose and Application-Based Systems]: – Micropro...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: David Sheldon, Rakesh Kumar, Frank Vahid, Dean M. Tullsen, Roman L. Lysecky
• Keywords: Hardware, Hardware Units, ICCAD 2006, Programmable Processors, Soft-core Processors