NISC: The Ultimate Reconfigurable Component
Daniel D. Gajski · 2003
With complexities of Systems-on-Chip rising almost daily, the design community has been searching for new methodology that can handle given complexities with increased productivity and decreased times-to-market. The obvious solution that comes to mind is increasing levels of abstraction, or in other words, increasing the size of the basic building blocks. However, it is not clear how many of these building blocks we need and what these basic blocks should be. Obviously, the necessary building blocks are processors and memories. One interesting question is: “Are they sufficient?”. The other interesting question is: “How many types of processors and memories we really need?”. In this report we try to answer both of these questions and argue that the No-instruction-set computer (NISC) is a single, necessary and sufficient processor component for design of any digital system.