Object-oriented approach to Rapid Custom Instruction design

TL;DR

This paper presents an object-oriented method for rapid custom instruction design in SoC development, automating hardware generation and code updates to simplify complex embedded system design.

Contribution

It introduces an object-oriented approach with auto-generation of hardware instructions and code integration, streamlining SoC design process.

Findings

Validated on 3D sample application

Demonstrated acceleration of SoC design process

Achieved low-cost hardware customization

Abstract

Due to continuous evolution of Systems-on-Chip (SoC), the complexity of their design and development has augmented exponentially. To deal with the ever-growing complexity of such embedded systems, we introduce, in this paper, an object-oriented approach to rapid SoC design using auto-generation of hardware custom instructions to simplify and accelerate the SoC design process. In our approach, a Data Flow Graph (DFG) is adopted as a representation of the arithmetic operation to convert it to a custom instruction. Then VHDL code will be automatically generated. The input C code is automatically updated for calling the new hardware components. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a Java source code framework named Automatic Custom Architecture generator (ACAgen) is developed. Experimental results on 3D sample application validate our approach and demonstrate how the proposed framework facilitates and accelerates the SoC design process at low costs.