AN EMBEDDED LOW POWER/COST 16-BIT MICROPROCESSOR FOR INFORMATION APPLIANCE

In this paper, we propose a microprocessor architecture called SYS16TM for low power/cost in midrange performance embedded system. For embedded applications, ARM7 is the most popular microprocessor which is originally design in high performance and low power/cost [1]. One feature of ARM7 is that it has two instruction set called ARM and THUMB. THUMB is design for low code size and high performance over narrow bandwidth memory. By our observation, implement THUMB instruction set independently may be benefit in midrange computing complexity applications. In this paper, we provide data from running ARM7 simulator to support our claim. And explain how we can modify instruction set and micro-architecture to achieve low cost/power while maintaining significant performance. After implementation of SYS16TM, we compare it with our ARM7 implementation. And in the end, we explain how we can still reuse ARM7 software environment like complier and simulation after modification of ARM7