A cost effective multimedia extension to ARM7 microprocessors

This paper presents a cost-effective multimedia extension to the ARM7 architecture (v4T), a low-cost embedded microprocessor. A multimedia extension (MME) module has been constructed as a functional unit for the ARM7 processor core. It provides common media operations such as saturating addition and multiply-accumulation, etc. All operations of the MME module perform subword parallelism on byte or half-word entities. The SIMD-styled operations allow a higher processing throughput. The module has been successfully integrated with a synthesizable ARM7 core. The synthesis results show that the MME module is capable of reducing the execution cycle counts by 69% to 81% for several multimedia critical loops, with an average speedup of 3.41, while the gate count overhead is kept under 11%