Merged Dictionary Code Compression for FPGA Implementation of Custom Microcoded PEs

Abstract

Horizontal Microcoded Architecture (HMA) is a paradigm for designing programmable high-performance processing elements (PEs). However, it suffers from large code size, which can be addressed by compression. In this article, we study the code size of one of the new HMA-based technologies called No-Instruction-Set Computer (NISC). We show that NISC code size can be several times larger than a typical RISC processor, and we propose several low-overhead dictionary-based code compression techniques to reduce its code size. Our compression algorithm leverages the knowledge of “don't care” values in the control words and can reduce the code size by 3.3 times, on average. Despite such good results, as shown in this article, these compression techniques lead to poor FPGA implementations because they require many on-chip RAMs. To address this issue, we introduce an FPGA-aware dictionary-based technique that uses the dual-port feature of on-chip RAMs to reduce the number of utilized block RAMs by half. Additionally, we propose cascading two-levels of dictionaries for code size and block RAM reduction of large programs. For an MP3 application, a merged, cascaded, three-dictionary implementation reduces the number of utilized block RAMs by 4.3 times (76%) compared to a NISC without compression. This corresponds to 20% additional savings over the best single level dictionary-based compression.