An Architecture Framework For Application-specific And Scalable Architectures

Two major limitations concerning the design of cost-efective application-specific architectures are the recurrent costs of system-software development and hardware implementation, in particular VLSI implementation, for each architecture. The, Scalable ARChitecture Experiment (SCARCE) aims to provide a framework for application-specific processor design. The framework allows scaling Of functionality, implementation complexity, and performance. The SCARCE framework con- sists and will consist Of: an architecture framework defirting the constraints for the design of application-specific architectures; tools for synthesizing architectures from application or application-area; VLSI cell libraries and tools for quick gener- ation of application-specific processors; a system-software plat- form which can be retargeted quickly to fit the application- specific architecture; This paper concentrates primarily on the architecture frame- work of SCARCE, but also presents briefly some software issues and outlines the process of generating VLSI processors.