Pre-fetching for improved core interfacing

Reuse of cores can reduce design time for systems-on-a-chip. Such reuse is dependent on being able to easily interface a core to any bus. To enable such interfacing, many propose separating a core's interface from its internals. However, this separation can lead to a performance penalty when reading a core's internal registers. We introduce pre-fetching, which is analogous to caching, as a technique to reduce or eliminate this performance penalty, involving a tradeoff with power and size. We describe the pre-fetching technique, classify different types of registers, describe our initial pre-fetching architectures and heuristics for certain classes of registers, and highlight experiments demonstrating the performance improvements and size/power tradeoffs.