1A new multithreaded architecture supporting direct execution of Esterel

Abstract—We propose a fully pipelined, multithreaded, reac-tive processor called STARPro for direct execution of Esterel. STARPro provides native support for Esterel threads and their scheduling. In addition, it also natively supports Esterel’s pre-emption constructs, instructions for signal manipulation, and a notion of logical ticks for synchronous execution. In addition to the reactive processors, we propose a new intermediate format called UCCFGsd (unrolled concurrent control-flow graph with surface and depth) that closely resembles the Esterel source. A compiler based on UCCFGsd, has been developed for code generation. We have synthesized STARPro and have carried out a range of benchmarking experiments. Experimental results reveal substantial improvement in performance and code size compared to software compilers. We also excel in comparison to recent reactive architectures, by achieving an average speed-up of 37% in worst-case reaction times, and a speed-up of 38 % in average-case reaction times. This has been achieved by utilizing fewer hardware resources, while incurring an average code size increase of 40%. Index Terms—Compilation, concurrency, Esterel, reactive pro