Heterogeneous multi-pipeline application specific instruction-set processor design and implementation

Embedded systems are becoming ubiquitous, primarily due to the fast evolution of digital electronic devices. The design of modern embedded systems requires systems to exhibit, high performance and reliability, yet have short design time and low cost. Application Specific Instruction set processors (ASIPs) are widely used in embedded system since they are economical to use, flexible, and reusable (thus saves design time). During the last decade research work on ASIPs have been carried out in mainly for single pipelined processors. Improving performance in processors is possible by exploring the available parallelism in the program. Designing of multiple parallel execution paths for parallel execution of the processor naturally incurs additional cost.The methodology presented in this dissertation has addressed the problem of improving performance in ASIPs, at minimal additional cost. The devised methodology explores the available parallelism of an application to generate a multi-pipeline heterogeneous ASIP. The processor design is application specific. No pre-defined IPs are used in the design. The generated processor contains multiple standalone pipelined data paths, which are not necessarily identical, and are connected by the necessary bypass paths and control signals. Control unit are separate for each pipeline (though with the same clock) resulting in a simple and cost effective design. By using separate instruction and data memories (Harvard architecture) and by allowing memory access by two separate pipes, the complexity of the controller and buses are reduced. The impact of higher memory latencies is nullified by utilizing parallel pipes during memory access. Efficient bypass network selection and encoding techniques provide a better implementation.The initial design approach with only two pipelines without bypass paths show speed improvements of up to 36% and switching activity reductions of up to 11%. The additional area costs around 16%. An improved design with different number of pipelines (more than two) based on applications show on average of 77% performance improvement with overheads of: 49% on area; 51% on leakage power; 17% on switching activity; and 69% on code size. The design was further trimmed, with bypass path selection and encoding techniques, which show a saving of up to 32% of area and 34% of leakage power with 6% performance improvement and 69% of code size reduction compared to the design approach without these techniques in the multi pipeline design