MULTICLUSTER PROCESSORS. IN THE FIRST OF TWO TIGHTLY COUPLED COMPONENTS, DESIGN SPACE EXPLORATION HEURISTICALLY SEARCHES THE BASIC CAPABILITIES THAT DEFINE THE PROCESSOR’S OVERALL PARALLELISM. IN THE SECOND, A HARDWARE COMPILER DETERMINES THE DETAILED ARC

Many portable devices must perform computationally demanding processing of images, sound, video, or packet streams. Current embedded processors cannot meet these devices ’ performance requirements under tight power and cost constraints. Therefore, hardware designers must create a new generation of processors that provide far greater performance and flexibility while using less power and space. Application-specific instruction processors (ASIPs) have great potential to meet the challenging demands of pervasive systems. A custom-designed processor provides highly specialized computation capabilities to mee