Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Microcode enables programmability of (micro) architectural structures to enhance functionality and to apply patches to an existing design. As more features get added to a CPU core, the area and power costs associated with microcode increase. One solution to address the microcode size issue is to store the microcode in a compressed form and decompress it during execution. Furthermore, the reuse of a single hardware building block layout to implement different dictionaries in the two-level microcode compression reduces the cost and the design time of the decompression engine. However, the reuse of the hardware building block imposes structural constraints to the compression algorithm, and existing algorithms may yield poor compression. In this paper, we develop the SC2 algorithm that considers the structural constraint in its objective function and reduces the area expansion when reusing hardware building blocks to implement different dictionaries. Our experimental results show that the SC2 algorithm is able to produce similar sized dictionaries and achieves the similar compression ratio to the non-constrained algorithm. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2011 | 10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2011.32 | SBAC-PAD |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
microcode increase,compression algorithm,two-level microcode compression,structural constraint,non-constrained algorithm,similar compression ratio,microcode size issue,different dictionary,structure-constrained microcode compression,poor compression,sc2 algorithm,firmware,compression ratio,algorithm design and analysis,data compression,clustering algorithms,microprogramming,algorithm design,engines,encoding,objective function,read only memory,hardware,dictionaries | Microcode,Algorithm design,Reuse,Computer science,Parallel computing,Compression ratio,Data compression,Multi-core processor,Encoding (memory),Firmware | Conference |
Citations | PageRank | References |
0 | 0.34 | 10 |
Authors | ||
4 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Edson Borin | 1 | 131 | 10.48 |
| Guido Araujo | 2 | 451 | 38.59 |
| Mauricio Breternitz Jr. | 3 | 15 | 2.76 |
| Youfeng Wu | 4 | 749 | 52.16 |