Nanoprocessors: Configurable Hardware Accelerators for Embedded Systems

TITLE OF THESIS: NANOPROCESSORS: CONFIGURABLE HARDWARE ACCELERATORS FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS Lei Zong, Master of Science, 2003 Thesis directed by: Professor Bruce L. Jacob Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Today’s consumer market is driven by technology innovations. Many technologies that were not available a few years ago are quickly being adopted into common use. Equipment for these services requires microprocessors inside and can be regarded as embedded systems. Embedded systems are designed to serve a particular functionality at a minimal cost. To improve efficiency and throughput, embedded systems uses hardware peripherals to perform sub-functionality in hardware. Because there are many vendors of embedded systems and each system is designed for a specific purpose, the peripherals differ widely across systems. Applications developed for a particular system is not portable to another system. As a result, many embedded systems incorporate programmable hardware to provide flexibility. One popular use of the programmable hardware is for I/ O devices. In this work, we propose and discuss other uses for the programmable hardware. Specifically, we have identified an I/O controller and a hardware scheduler that can be incorporated into programmable logic. Our result shows that these hardware components improve the system performance significantly at a nominal cost. NANOPROCESSORS: CONFIGURABLE HARDWARE ACCELERATORS FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

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