Development of Architectures and Design Methodologies of Customizable IP Cores for System-LSI's

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The objective of this research project is to develop architectures and design methodologies of customizable IP cores for system-LSI's. The project has performed the following research results.(1) Development of customizable IP core architectures : The project has developed several customizable processors and co-processors as customizable IP cores, and design methodologies for these IP cores. The technologies developed include (I) customizable processors where the performance and energy consumption of their functional units can be (re)configured and optimized at either compile time or run time, (ii)customizable co-processors whose functionality and organization can be reconfigured at run time, (iii) online hardware synthesis technology which produces hardware configuration information for the customizable co-processors, and so on.(2) Development of customizable memory core architectures : The project has developed several customizable memory cores and related technologies ; (I) customizing the instruction decoding for object programs, based on the statistical analysis on the appearance frequency of bit patterns of instructions, so that the power consumed for fetching instructions from a program ROM, (ii) customizing and reducing the number of tag lookups for instruction cache, based on the profile of instruction fetch addresses, so that the power consumed for checking the instruction cache tags, and so on.(3) Development of customization techniques for variable-size datapath and memory-path : The project has developed some techniques for analyzing the dynamic ranges of variables in source programs, and then determining the size of datapath and memory-path so that tradeoff between the performance and power consumption can be achieved.