For the first time advances in semiconductor manufacturing do not lead to a corresponding increase in performance. At 65 nm and below it is predicted that only a small portion of performance increase will be attributed to shrinking geometries while the lion share is due to innovative processor architectures. To substantiate this assertion it is instructive to look at major drivers of the semiconductor industry: wireless communications and multimedia. Both areas are characterized by an exponentially increasing demand of computational power, which cannot be provided in an energy-efficient manner by traditional processor architectures. Today’s applications in wireless communications and multimedia require highly specialized and optimized architectures.
New software tools and a sophisticated methodology above RTL are required to answer the challenges of designing an optimized application specific processor (ASIP). This book offers an automated and fully integrated implementation flow and compares it to common implementation practice. Case-studies emphasise that neither the architectural advantages nor the design space of ASIPs are sacrificed for an automated implementation. Realizing a building block which fulfils the requirements on programmability and computational power is now efficiently possible for the first time.
Optimized ASIP Synthesis from Architecture Description Language Models inspires hardware designers as well as application engineers to design powerful ASIPs that will make their SoC designs unique.