INSIDE: INstruction Selection/Identification & Design Exploration for extensible processors
Newton Cheung, Sri Parameswaran, J. Henkel · 2003
This paper presents the INSIDE system that rapidly searches the design space for extensible processors, given area and performance constraints of an embedded application, while minimizing the design turn-around-time. Our system consists of a) a methodology to determine which code segments are most suited for implementation as a set of extensible instructions, b) a heuristic algorithm to select pre-configured extensible processors as well as extensible instructions (library), and c) an estimation tool which rapidly estimates the performance of an application on a generated extensible processor. By selecting the right combination of a processor core plus extensible instructions, we achieve a performance increase on average of 2.03x (up to 7x) compared to the base processor core at a minimum hardware overhead of 25% on average.