Application-Specific Embedded Processors

Today’s silicon technology allows building embedded processors as part of SoCs (systems-on-chip) comprising upto a billion of transistors on a single die. Interestingly, real-world SOCs (in large quantities for mainstream applications) utilizing this potential complexity do hardly exist. Another observation is that the semiconductor industry a couple of years ago experienced an inflection point: the number of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) design starts was outpaced by the number of design starts for Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs). Moreover, we might face a new design productivity gap: the “gap of complexity” (details and references will follow later). Together these observations are reflecting a transition in the way embedded processors are designed. This article reports on and analyzes current and possible future trends from a perspective of embedded system design with an emphasis on design environments for so-called extensible processor platforms. It describes the state-of-the-art in the three main steps when designing an extensible processor, namely

Code Segment Identification

,

Extensible Instruction Generation

,

Architectural Customization Selection

.