High-Level Modeling and FPGA Prototyping of Produced Order Parallel Queue Processor Core

Abstract

Emerging high-level hardware description and synthesis technologies in conjunction with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have significantly lowered the threshold for hardware development. Opportunities exist to integrate these technologies into a tool for exploring and evaluating microarchitectural designs especially for newly proposed architectures. This paper presents a prototyping of a new processor core based on Queue architecture as starting point for application-specific processor design exploration. Using a hardware description language, we have created the Synthesizable model of a produced order parallel queue processor core for the integer subset parallel Queue architecture. A prototype implementation is produced by synthesizing the high-level model for the Stratix FPGA prototyping board. We show how to perform prototyping and optimizations to fully exploit the capabilities of the prototyped Queue processor core, while maintaining a common source base.