Title
Increasing ILP of RISC Microprocessors Through Control-Flow Based Reconfiguration
Abstract
This work introduces a new concept of enhancing a RISC microprocessor with a tightly coupled reconfigurable ALU array, a vector load/store unit and a control flow manipulation unit. These units implement coarse-grain reconfigurable structures by means of switchable contexts. Context activation is performed event-driven according to the instruction pointer of the RISC microprocessor. The synchronous operation of the context controlled functional units enables instruction level parallelism (ILP) comparable to complex VLIW processors, without introducing instruction overhead. The reconfigurable units can be adapted to the application demands exploiting parallelism more coarse-grain than common instruction-level functional units. To evaluate the concept, a standard ARM RISC microprocessor was chosen to be tightly coupled to these reconfigurable units. Architecture description and simulation were performed using RECAST, a reconfiguration-enabled architecture description language and simulation tool-set. The software environment also includes a retargetable, parallelizing C compiler based on the SUIF compiler kit. First experiments executing DSP algorithms have indicated, that the proposed architecture can exploit more of the potential application parallelism than conventional VLIW processors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1007/978-3-540-30117-2_79
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
functional unit,control flow,architecture description language
Instruction-level parallelism,Computer science,Very long instruction word,Real-time computing,Control unit,Computer architecture,Software architecture description,Parallel computing,Microprocessor,Compiler,Reduced instruction set computing,Embedded system,Architecture description language
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
3203
0302-9743
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.46
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Steffen Köhler194.26
Jens Braunes262.34
Thomas Preußer320.80
Martin Zabel4525.27
Rainer G. Spallek513725.30