The QC-2 parallel Queue processor architecture

Abstract

Queue based instruction set architecture processor offers an attractive option in the design of embedded systems. In our previous work, we proposed a novel queue processor architecture as a starting point for hardware/software design space exploration for embedded applications. In this paper, we present a high performance 32-bit Synthesizable QueueCore (QC-2)—an improved and optimized version of the produced order parallel Queue processor (PQP), with single precision floating-point support. The QC-2 core also implements a novel technique used to extend immediate values and memory instruction offsets that were otherwise not representable because of bit-width constraints in the PQP processor. A prototype implementation is produced by synthesizing the high-level model for a target FPGA device. We present the architecture description and design results in a fair amount of details.