ASIP (Application Specific Instruction-set Processors) design

Summary form only given. ASIP is application specific instruction-set processor dedicated designed for an application domain. ASIP instruction set is specifically designed to accelerate heavy and most used functions. ASIP architecture is designed to implement the assembly instruction set with minimum hardware cost. ASIP DSP is an application specific digital signal processor for iterative data manipulation and transformation extensive applications. General-purpose processor designers think of both the maximum performance and maximum flexibility. The instruction set must be general enough to support general applications. The compiler should offer compilation for all programs and to adapt all programmers' coding behaviors. ASIP designers have to think about applications and cost first. Usually the biggest challenges for ASIP designers are the silicon cost and power consumption. Based on the carefully specified function coverage, the goal of an ASIP design is to reach the highest performance over silicon, over power consumption, as well over the design cost. The requirement on flexibility should be sufficient instead of ultimate. The performance is application specific instead of the highest one. In this tutorial, ASIP, application specific instruction set processor, will be introduced and discussed for audience who want to know ASIP yet not want to design it. The introduction includes ASIP design flow, source code profiling, architecture exploration, assembly instruction set design, design of assembly language programming toolchain, firmware design, benchmarking, and micro architecture design. Two examples, design for instruction set level acceleration of radio baseband, and design for instruction set level acceleration of image and video signal processing, will be introduced. For professional ASIP designers, please read, Dake Liu Embedded DSP Processor Design Application Specific Instruction set Processors Elsevier 2008 ISBN 9780123741233, for details.