Employing Compilers for Determining Architectural Features of Application-Specific DSPs

In order to achieve high performance and low hardware overhead over application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), application-specific DSPs (AS-DSPs) are more and more widely used. However, designing them is still a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone task since each application has to be analyzed thoroughly, which is usually done by hand. Recently, we proposed a platform approach to design data paths for AS-DSPs. In this paper we are introducing a compiler-based methodology to speed-up and simplify the customization of the data path platform. Based on the SUIF compiler framework by Stanford University, we implemented analysis passes to determine the kind and useful number of functional units, the potential degree of parallelism, and the required connectivity between functional units.