Design of parallelized controllers for high-performance controller-datapath systems

The controller in a controller-datapath system plays an important role in determining the system cycle time. A new approach based on precomputation technique is proposed to parallelize the execution of controller and datapath. The parallelized controller precomputes all possible next states and urgent control outputs in each state before control inputs arrive, and then selects and stores the true next state and control outputs by the value of control inputs at the end of present state. The proposed approach removes the control path from the critical path of the system, leads to a smaller and more predictable system cycle time. Experimental results show that a significant improvement in system cycle time and system performance can be achieved while maintaining a very low area overhead.