RAPID DESIGN EXPLORATION FRAMEWORK FOR APPLICATION-AWARE CUSTOMIZATION OF SOFT CORE PROCESSORS

Off-the-shelf soft core processors are becoming increasingly popular in embedded systems design today as they provide for application specific customization, in particular through instruction subsetting. However, choosing the right proces-sor configuration remains a challenge as the search space becomes prohibitively large when the configurable options increase. In this paper we propose a framework to rapidly explore the processor configuration design space for a given application. Unlike existing approaches that require time-consuming synthesis process, the proposed method relies only on a single-pass output of the LLVM compiler infras-tructure. Experimental results based on widely used bench-marks show that the proposed framework can reliably pre-dict the actual performance and area trends of various con-figurable options. 1