Semi-automatic Microarchitecture Con guration of Soft-Core Systems

The major goal of our project is to measure and improve application performance, by providing an easily and efficiently reconfigurable architecture along with software support to expedite its use. Our FPGA-based system is implemented as an extensible hardware module on the Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX) platform at Washington University. The FPX platform provides an environment where a circuit implemented in FPGA hardware can be developed, uploaded, and tested with live data using web and network interfaces. Our research begins with LEON, a soft-core implementation of a SPARC instruction set. We can easily add instructions and microarchitecture enhancements to LEON and evaluate their performance using a cycle-accurate profiling circuit that we have designed to operate with LEON.