CUSTARD - a customisable threaded FPGA soft processor and tools

We propose CUSTARD - customisable threaded architecture - a soft processor design space that combines support for multiple hardware threads and automatically generated custom instructions. Multiple threads incur low additional hardware cost and allow fine-grained concurrency without multiple processor cores or software overhead. Custom instructions, generated for a specific application, accelerate frequently performed computations by implementing them as dedicated hardware. In this paper we present a flexible processor and compiler generation system, FPGA implementations of CUSTARD and performance/area results for media and cryptography benchmarks.