Construction and exploitation of VLIW ASIPs with heterogeneous vector-widths

Numerous applications in important domains, such as communication and multimedia, show a significant data-level parallelism (DLP). A large part of the DLP is usually exploited through application vectorization and implementation of vector operations in processors executing the applications. While the amount of DLP varies between applications of the same domain or even within a single application, processor architectures usually support a single vector width. This may not be optimal and may cause a substantial energy inefficiency. Therefore, an adequate more sophisticated exploitation of DLP is highly relevant. This paper proposes the use of heterogeneous vector widths and a method to explore the heterogeneous vector widths for VLIW ASIPs. In our context, heterogeneity corresponds to the usage of two or more different vector widths in a single ASIP. After a brief explanation of the target ASIP architecture model, the paper describes the vector-width exploration method and explains the associated design automation tools. Subsequently, experimental results are discussed