Design challenges for new application specific processors

Abstract

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS form a market that is already larger and growing more rapidly than that of general-purpose computers. In fact, realtime multimedia and signal processing embedded applications currently account for over 90% of all computer cycles. 8 Our focus in this article will be on an increasingly important set of embedded applications, consisting of portable systems in the areas of digital communications and multimedia consumer electronics (e.g., cellular phones, personal digital assistants, digital video cameras, and multimedia terminals). These complex systems rely on "power-hungry" algorithms for high-bandwidth wireless communications, video compression and decompression, handwriting recognition, speech and image processing, etc. The portability of these systems makes energy consumption a particularly critical design concern as it reduces battery life. Moreover, high power dissipation leads to more expensive packaging and decreases reliability. At the same time, levels of microelectronic integration continue to rise, enabling more integrat-

Further Specialization of Clustered VLIW Processors: A MAP Decoder for Software Defined Radio

“…This provides it with a higher flexibility and optimizes the resources utilization ratio, although this complicates the work of the programmer in charge of maintaining the pipeline [8]. Depending on the particular turbo code (different standards and code sizes) and procedure (straightforward procedure, sliding windows) each operation executes differently regarding data and interconnections.…”

“…The challenges and future trends, like retargetable compilers and synthesis tools, were discussed in [8], and the first steps in finding standard methodologies and CAD tools have also been proposed [12], [13], to help designers in several tasks, including hardware/software partition and early design exploration. However a complete automated methodology is still far off.…”

“…More specifically, it consists of a set of heterogeneous functional units, which execute operations on various data The machine has only one thread of control, although several computations are performed in parallel. It is the duty of the programmer to set up and maintain the instruction pipeline [8].…”

“…We have targeted low area and low power consumption, always taking into account that the system has to be compliant with third generation standards regarding data throughput. Based on [8], three specialization dimensions have been considered in designing the VLIW machine:…”

Application Analysis with Integrated Identification of Complex Instructions for Configurable Processors

“…for high bandwidth wireless communications or video compression and decompression [1]. The portability of these systems makes energy consumption a critical design concern.…”