Conjoining soft-core FPGA processors

David Sheldon, Rakesh Kumar, Frank Vahid, Dean Tullsen, Roman Lysecky

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD
Pages694-701
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Event2006 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD - San Jose, CA, United States
Duration: Nov 5 2006Nov 9 2006

Publication series

NameIEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
ISSN (Print)1092-3152

Other

Other2006 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose, CA
Period11/5/0611/9/06

Keywords

  • Conjoined processors
  • Customization
  • FPGAs
  • Parameterized platforms
  • Soft-core processors
  • Tuning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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