In this paper we examine the performance and area trade-offs resulting from customizing the datapath and instruction set architecture of a soft VLIW processor. In addition to describing the datapath and instruction set architecture of our processor, we describe a number of microarchitectural optimizations we used to reduce the area of the datapath. We also describe the tools we developed and used to customize, generate, implement, and program the processor. Our experimental results show that datapath and instruction set customization achieve high levels of performance, and that microarchitectural optimizations like selective data forwarding help keep FPGA resource utilization in check.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.