Application-Specific Instruction Generation for SOC Processors

Application-specific instruction set processors assures good tradeoff between efficiency and flexibility in SOC design. However, it is difficult to obtain the extended instructions by manual designs for large programs with various design constraints. A two-phase design flow is proposed to automatically generate application specific instructions to achieve the better performance. Firstly, we translate various applications from C programs to a control/data flow graph. Secondly, a set of proposed algorithms is utilized to analyze the dependency of instructions in the data flow graph as well as to generate and evaluate application-specific instructions. Experimental results indicate that the MiBench applications can be improved about 1.5 to 3.18 times speedup using our generated application-specific instructions.