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research article

Making Wide-Issue VLIW Processors Viable on FPGAs

Purnaprajna, Madhura  
•
Ienne, Paolo  
2012
Acm Transactions On Architecture And Code Optimization

Soft and highly-customized processors are emerging as a common way to efficiently control large amount of computing resources available on FPGAs. Yet, some processor architectures of choice for DSP and media applications, such as wide-issue VLIW processors, remain impractical: the multi-ported register file makes a very inefficient use of the resources in the FPGA fabric. This paper proposes modifications to existing FPGAs to make soft-VLIW processor viable. We introduce an embedded multi-ported RAM that can be customized to match the issue-width of VLIW processors. To ascertain the benefits of this approach, we map an extensible VLIW processor onto a standard FPGA from Xilinx. For the register file implemented in the modified FPGA, the area occupied is at least 102x smaller and the dynamic power is reduced by 41% as compared to the implementation using configurable logic blocks in existing standard FPGAs. A subset of this embedded multi-ported RAM can also be used for mapping the register file in soft-RISC processors. For the soft-RISC processor, the register file in the modified FPGA is at least 22x smaller than its equivalent that uses configurable logic blocks and 1.5 x the size in comparison to the implementation using block RAMs. Reduction of routing area and the maximum net length is about 39% and 51% respectively for RISC processors. As a result, this approach works towards enhancing soft-processor density in FPGAs by orders of magnitude.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1145/2086696.2086712
Web of Science ID

WOS:000299995000016

Author(s)
Purnaprajna, Madhura  
Ienne, Paolo  
Date Issued

2012

Published in
Acm Transactions On Architecture And Code Optimization
Volume

8

Issue

4

Start page

33

Subjects

Design

•

Algorithms

•

Performance

•

Soft-processor

•

resource efficiency

•

multi-port memory

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LAP  
Available on Infoscience
March 8, 2012
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/78542
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