Design and Implementation of Communicating Fixed and Variable Instruction Set Processors

The paper describes a computational system that is composed of a special-purpose processor augmented by an application-targeted coprocessor with variable instruction set. The primary objective is to form the processor architecture in such a way that is the most appropriate to a selected scope of applications and to optimize instructions of the coprocessor for a particular application. As an example the scope of combinatorial search algorithms was examined and experiments were carried out and analyzed with the relevant system implemented in FPGAs.