EXTENSIBLE SOFTWARE EMULATOR FOR RECONFIGURABLE INSTRUCTION CELL BASED PROCESSORS

Mark Muir, Iain Lindsay, Tughrul Arslan, Ioannis Nousias, Sami Khawam, Mark Milward, Nazish Aslam, Adam Major

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

This paper presents a novel high-speed behavioural simulator (software-based emulator) for reconfigurable instruction cell based processors. These architectures are particularly suited to providing low-power, low-cost implementations of applications in a streaming environment, such as image signal processing, video playback, or base-band signal processing. As a result, many realistic applications operate on very large data sets, so simulation time plays a key role in the time to market. The key aspect of this work is an efficient serialisation algorithm (based on topological sort), able to capture the intricacies of reconfigurable processors that can be reconfigured very rapidly (ns). This allows for a new generation of high-speed emulation models to be constructed. The performance of this algorithm deployed in art interpreter-based model is compared to other simulation techniques. The emulator can achieve performance around two orders of magnitude higher than current event-driven software models, and similar to that of an FPGA-based model. This brings the simulation times low enough to be able to use this technology as the basis for feedback-directed optimisation, which can significantly improve the performance of application code.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE INTERNATIONAL SOC CONFERENCE, PROCEEDINGS
EditorsT Arslan, T Tran, T Buechner, A Marshall
Place of PublicationNEW YORK
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages35-40
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)978-1-4244-2596-9
Publication statusPublished - 2008
EventIEEE International SOC Conference - Newport Beach
Duration: 17 Sept 200820 Sept 2008

Conference

ConferenceIEEE International SOC Conference
CityNewport Beach
Period17/09/0820/09/08

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