Fine-grained application source code profiling for asip design

Current Application Specific Instruction set Processor (ASIP) design methodologies are mostly based on itera-tive architecture exploration that uses Architecture Descrip-tion Languages (ADLs) and retargetable software develop-ment tools. However, for improved design efficiency, ad-ditional pre-architecture exploration tools are required to help narrow-down the huge design space and making coarse-grained Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) decisions before detailed ADL modeling. Extensive application code pro-filing is the key in such early design stages. Based on a novel code instrumentation technology, we present a micro-profiling approach that fills the current gap between source-level and instruction-level profilers and combines their ad-vantages w.r.t. speed and accuracy. We show how the micro-profiler is embedded into an advanced ASIP design flow and justify its use in a case study to design an MP3 decoder ASIP