A proposed synthesis method for Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors

Abstract

Due to the rapid technology advancement in integrated circuit era, the need for the high computation performance together with increasing complexity and manufacturing costs has raised the demand for high-performance configurable designs; therefore, the Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors (ASIPs) are widely used in SoC design. The automated generation of software tools for ASIPs is a commonly used technique, but the automated hardware model generation is less frequently applied in terms of final RTL implementations. Contrary to this, the final register-transfer level models are usually created, at least partly, manually. This paper presents a novel approach for automated hardware model generation for ASIPs. The new solution is based on a novel abstract ASIP model and a modeling language (Algorithmic Microarchitecture Description Language, AMDL) optimized for this architecture model. The proposed AMDL-based pre-synthesis method is based on a set of pre-defined VHDL implementation schemes, which ensure the qualities of the automatically generated register-transfer level models in terms of resource requirement and operation frequency. The design framework implementing the algorithms required by the synthesis method is also presented.