A scalable instruction buffer and align unit for xDSPcore

Abstract

Increasing mask costs and decreasing feature sizes together with productivity demand have led to the trend of platform design. Software programmable embedded cores are used to provide the necessary flexibility in integrated systems. Facing increasing system complexity, single-issue digital signal processors (DSPs) have been replaced by cores providing the execution of several instructions in parallel. The most common programming model for multi-issue DSP core architectures is Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) which is based on static scheduling, and enables minimization of the worst case execution time and reduces core complexity. The drawback of traditional VLIW is poor code density, which leads to high program memory requirements and, therefore, requires a large silicon area of the DSP subsystem. To overcome this problem without limiting the core performance, a scalable long instruction word (xLIW) is introduced. A special align unit is used for implementing the xLIW program memory interface. In this paper, the align unit and its main architectural feature, a scalable instruction buffer, is introduced in detail. xLIW is part of a project for a parameterized DSP core.