CRISP : a scalable VLIW processor for low power multimedia systems

Over the last couple of years, the demand for portable multimedia devices has been growing at an impressive rate. The ideal multimedia device will present high quality multimedia content, and will be networked, portable, inexpensive and easy to use. In order to cope with the dynamism of current and future multimedia applications, it will be based on one or more programmable processors specially designed for the application domain. Realizing this device requires an amazing increase in processor's computing power while keeping the energy consumption growth at a minimum. This dissertation proves that widening a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor can be an effective way to improve the energy efficiency of multimedia applications if the adequate architectural and compilation techniques are used to overcome the scaling limitations of VLIW processors