application-specificcustomizationofmicroblazeprocessors,.ppt

Frank Vahid, UC Riverside Application-Specific Customization of Microblaze Processors, and other UCR FPGA Research Frank Vahid Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, Riverside Associate Director, Center for Embedded Computer Systems, UC Irvine Work supported by the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and Xilinx Collaborators: David Sheldon (4th yr UCR PhD student), Roman Lysecky (PhD UCR 2005, now Asst. Prof. at U. Arizona), Rakesh Kumar (PhD UCSD 2006, now Asst. Prof. at UIUC), Dean Tullsen (Prof. at UCSD) Outline Two UCR ICCAD’06 papers Microblaze customization Microblaze conjoining (and customization) Current work targetting Microblaze users “Design of Experiments” paradigm System-level synthesis for multi-core systems Related FPGA work Warp processing Standard binaries for FPGAs Microblaze Customization (ICCAD paper #1) FPGAs an increasingly popular software platform FPGA soft core processor Microprocessor synthesized onto FPGA fabric Soft core customization Cores come with configurable parameters Xilinx Microblaze comes with several instantiatable units: multiplier, barrel shifter, divider, FPU, or cache Customization: Tuning soft core parameters to a specific application Instantiable Unit Speedups Instantiating units can yield significant speedups “base” – Microblaze without any optional units instantiated Customization Tradeoffs “Size” on an FPGA Defining a circuit’s “size” on an FPGA requires some work Different resources Lookup tables (LUTs) Embedded multipliers Embedded block RAM (BRAM) Our solution: Define “equivalent LUTs” for multipliers and BRAM Based on total LUTs, multipliers, and BRAMs in a “full” Microblaze Later found to closely match Xilinx’s “equivalent gates” concept Goal: Customize Soft Core to Minimize Application Runtime With and without size constraint Even without size constraint, must take care because some units reduce clock frequency and thus may slow r