Improving performance and energy consumption in embedded microprocessor platforms with a flexible custom coprocessor data-path

Abstract

The speedups and the energy reductions achieved in a generic single-chip microprocessor system by employing a high-performance data-path are presented. The data-path acts as a coprocessor that accelerates computational intensive kernel sections thereby increasing the overall performance. It is composed by Flexible Computational Components that can realize any two-level sequence of primitive operations. The automated coprocessor synthesis method from high-level software description and its integration to a design flow for executing applications on the system is presented. The estimated application speedups of eight real-life applications, relative to the software execution on the microprocessor range from 1.78 to 4.00, while the overhead in circuit area is small. The energy savings have an average value of 61%. A comparison with another high-performance data-path showed that the proposed coprocessor achieves smaller area-time products, by an average of 23%, for the synthesized data-paths.