IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems

In this paper, we describe a software-controlled approach for adaptively minimizing energy in embedded systems for real-time multimedia processing. Energy is optimized by clock speed setting: the software controller dynamically adjusts processor clock speed to the frame rate (FR) requirements of the incoming multimedia stream. The speed-setting policy is based on a system model that correlates clo... View full abstract»

Interest in low-power embedded systems has increased considerably in the past few years. To produce low-power code and to allow an estimation of power consumption of software running on embedded systems, a power model was developed based on physical measurement using an evaluation board and integrated into a compiler and profiler. The compiler uses the power information to choose instruction seque... View full abstract»

Software (SW) parts become crucial in embedded systems. Operating systems (OSs) are often used to handle SW concurrency and communication. We propose a method of automatic generation of application-specific OSs and automatic targeting of application SW. OS generation starts from a very small, but yet flexible OS kernel. OS services, which are specific to the application and deduced from dependenci... View full abstract»

The development of application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIP) is currently the exclusive domain of the semiconductor houses and core vendors. This is due to the fact that building such an architecture is a difficult task that requires expertise in different domains: application software development tools, processor hardware implementation, and system integration and verification. This ... View full abstract»

One important problem in code generation for embedded processors is the design of efficient compilers for target machines with application-specific architectures. This paper outlines the design of a C compiler for an industrial application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) for telecom applications. The target ASIP is a, network processor with special instructions for bit-level access to da... View full abstract»

Program-in chip-out (PICO) is a system for automatically synthesizing embedded hardware accelerators from loop nests specified in the C programming language. A key issue confronted when designing such accelerators is the optimization of hardware by exploiting information that is known about the varying number of bits required to represent and process operands. In this paper, we describe the handli... View full abstract»

This paper explores an application-specific customization technique for the data cache, one of the foremost area/power consuming and performance determining microarchitectural features of modern embedded processors. The automated methodology for. customizing the processor microarchitecture that we propose results in increased performance, reduced power consumption and improved determinism of criti... View full abstract»

A standard design methodology for embedded processors today is the system-on-a-chip design with potentially multiple heterogeneous processing elements on a chip, such as a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor, digital signal processor (DSP), and field-programmable gate array. To be able to program these devices, we need compilers that are capable of generating efficient code for the differe... View full abstract»