Title
Speedups in embedded systems with a high-performance coprocessor datapath
Abstract
This article presents the speedups achieved in a generic single-chip microprocessor system by employing a high-performance datapath. The datapath acts as a coprocessor that accelerates computational-intensive kernel sections thereby increasing the overall performance. We have previously introduced the datapath which is composed of Flexible Computational Components (FCCs). These components can realize any two-level template of primitive operations. The automated coprocessor synthesis method from high-level software description and its integration to a design flow for executing applications on the system is presented. For evaluating the effectiveness of our coprocessor approach, analytical study in respect to the type of the custom datapath and to the microprocessor architecture is performed. The overall application speedups of several real-life applications relative to the software execution on the microprocessor are estimated using the design flow. These speedups range from 1.75 to 5.84, with an average value of 3.04, while the overhead in circuit area is small. The design flow achieved the acceleration of the applications near to theoretical speedup bounds. A comparison with another high-performance datapath showed that the proposed coprocessor achieves smaller area-time products by an average of 23% for the generated datapaths. Additionally, the FCC coprocessor achieves better performance in accelerating kernels relative to software-programmable DSP cores.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1255456.1255472
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
Keywords
Field
DocType
coprocessor datapath,design flow,microprocessor architecture,generic single-chip microprocessor system,chaining,coprocessor approach,datapath act,high-performance coprocessor datapath,performance improvements,automated coprocessor synthesis method,proposed coprocessor,kernels,fcc coprocessor,high-performance datapath,synthesis,custom datapath,embedded system,chip
Datapath,Digital signal processing,Computer science,Parallel computing,Microprocessor,Finite state machine with datapath,Real-time computing,Design flow,Software,Coprocessor,Speedup,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
3
1084-4309
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
21
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michalis D. Galanis19415.60
Gregory Dimitroulakos2477.14
Spyros Tragoudas362588.87
Costas E Goutis418625.76