The Research And Implementation Of Automatic Instruction Set Extending Technology For ASIP

In recent years, the markets for PDAs, cellular phones, digital cameras, network routers and other high-performance but special-purpose devices has grown explosively. In these systems, application specific hardware design is used to meet the challenging cost, performance, and power demands. The most popular design strategy is to build a system consisting of a number of special-purpose ASICs coupled with a low cost core processor. While this approach is effective, ASICs are costly to design and offer only a hardware solution that permits almost no post programmability.Application-specific instructions-set processor (ASIP) was proposed to meet these challenges. Usually, ASIP is made on a basic CPU core. By designing application specific instructions, designers can improve CPU performance on these applications.The computation intensive portions of the same domain are often similar in the structure. Thus, the customized instructions can often be generalized in small ways to make their use have applicability across a set of applications.Designing application-specific instructions is critical to ASIP design. Automating the design process is of great importance to shortening the time-to-market of the product.Current technologies are not able to making the process fully automatic, and the impact of area and power are also not fully considered when selecting instructions. We present a fully automatic instruction generation system for specific applications in this paper, and in our system, the modification of compiler is also automatic.The result shows that the new instructions can bring 4.7% to 16.7% improvement, while keeping area and power almost unchanged.