Soft Core Processor Generated Based on the Machine Code of the Application

Abstract

Currently embedded system designs aim to improve areas such as speed, energy efficiency and the cost of an application. Application-specific instruction set extensions on reconfigurable hardware provide such opportunities. The article presents a new approach for generating soft core processors that are optimized for specific tasks. In this work, we describe an automatic method for selecting custom instructions for generating software core processors that are based on the machine code of the application program. As the result, a soft core processor will contain the logic that is absolutely necessary. This solution requires fewer gates to be synthesized in the field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and has a potential to increase the speed of the information processing that is performed by the system in the target FPGA. Experiments have confirmed the correct operation of the method that was used. After the reduction mechanism was enabled, the total number of slices blocks that were occupied decreased to 47% of its initial value in the best case for the Xilinx Spartan3 (xc3s200) and the maximum frequency increased approximately 44% in the best case for Xilinx Spartan6 (xc6slx4).