Application specific compiler/architecture codesign: a case study

This paper proposes an architecture exploration methodology for application specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) including a C compiler and a VHDL model in the exploration loop. For a given application the target architecture is an instance of the scalable ALICE VLIW architecture which will be presented in this paper. In a case study it will be explained how the LISA processor design platform in conjunction with the CoSy compiler environment significantly reduces the time for exploration cycles. Using a typical telecommunications application, the quality of the resulting architecture and its performance are compared to the ICORE2 processor - a manually designed ASIP for efficient processing of computation intensive kernels.

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