Research On Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP) Architecture Design

ASIP (Application Specific Instruction Processor) is a kind of special processor designed for specific applications. Making tradeoffs between speed, cost, power consumption and flexibility, the designers customize ASIP to meet the demand of many design goals. So ASIP is becoming more and more popular in embedded applications.When ASIP is used in embedded systems, the variance of applications and TTM (Time-to-Market) of the design poses challenges for ASIP designers. However, recent researches focus on some local factors of ASIP design. Most of them lack an easy-to-use, fast design method and evaluation environment. In this thesis, propose a "describe-explore-refine" design flow after analyzing existing design methodology. And then implement a prototype version of the design environment using our ASIP design method. The research mainly include(1) Software automatic generation based on architecture description language (ADL, Architecture Description Language). Use xpADL to drive multiple design tasks. The transformation and extension of execution semantics of xpADL can speedup the functional verification and performance evaluation.(2) Instruction customization and structure design space exploration base on basic instruction set method. Instruction set extension is evaluated by multi-objective unification evaluation model which uses performance, power, area, and code size as parameters. Encode instruction word based on low power state encoding. Meanwhile, adopt automatically generated tools to explore ASIP architecture design space, and obtain an optimal architecture.(3) Combining with features of ASIP architecture, study on application specific low power optimization technology focusing on instruction set (program code), pipeline and storage.(4) Build a "describe-explore-refine" design environment prototype system, A~2IDE. A~2IDE define multiple architecture instances (ARM, PISA, Vcore) as experimental ASIP. Verify the validity of the A~2IDE.Main contributions of this paper include:(1)After in-depth analysis of the design methodologies of electronic systems, propose a "describe-explore-refine" design flow. This design method uses...