Address generation unit for multimedia applications on application specific instruction set processors

Multimedia embedded systems require high performance specific computation to process the large among of data that characterizes the multimedia domain at low energy consumption due to battery life. Different optimizations at different levels can considerably improve performance and energy consumption and, after that, the address generation becomes the new performance bottleneck. This paper shows a custom-configurable address generation unit design which extends an application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) to boost the address calculations, improving performance and reducing the energy consumption around 27%. The main innovation of our work resides in a new custom-configurable AGU design which can be automatically implemented and directly connected to the ASIP data-path. This AGU design has a fast interface which allows reading one address in only one cycle and one instruction, and calculates new values without stopping the processor. The presented design can easily be implemented in broad range of ASIPs.