TY - GEN
T1 - Conjoining soft-core FPGA processors
AU - Sheldon, David
AU - Kumar, Rakesh
AU - Vahid, Frank
AU - Tullsen, Dean
AU - Lysecky, Roman
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Soft-core programmable processors on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be custom synthesized to instantiate only those hardware units, such as multipliers and floating-point units, that an application requires to meet performance demands, thus minimizing soft-core size on the FPGA. Conjoining processors, meaning to share hardware units among two or more processors, can further reduce soft-core size, leaving more resources for other circuits such as custom coprocessors. Using Xilinx MicroBlaze coprocessors and standard embedded system benchmarks, we show that conjoining two processors can provide 16% processor size reductions on average, with less than 1% cycle count overhead. We introduce an efficient dynamic-programming-based exploration method to find the best custom instantiation of hardware units, considering both standalone and conjoined options, for soft-core processors.
AB - Soft-core programmable processors on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be custom synthesized to instantiate only those hardware units, such as multipliers and floating-point units, that an application requires to meet performance demands, thus minimizing soft-core size on the FPGA. Conjoining processors, meaning to share hardware units among two or more processors, can further reduce soft-core size, leaving more resources for other circuits such as custom coprocessors. Using Xilinx MicroBlaze coprocessors and standard embedded system benchmarks, we show that conjoining two processors can provide 16% processor size reductions on average, with less than 1% cycle count overhead. We introduce an efficient dynamic-programming-based exploration method to find the best custom instantiation of hardware units, considering both standalone and conjoined options, for soft-core processors.
KW - Conjoined processors
KW - Customization
KW - FPGAs
KW - Parameterized platforms
KW - Soft-core processors
KW - Tuning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=46149099145&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1109/ICCAD.2006.320015
DO - 10.1109/ICCAD.2006.320015
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:46149099145
SN - 1595933891
SN - 9781595933898
T3 - IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
SP - 694
EP - 701
BT - Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD
T2 - 2006 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD
Y2 - 5 November 2006 through 9 November 2006
ER -