Enhancing energy efficiency of processor-based embedded systems through post-fabrication ISA extension

Abstract

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Application-specific instruction set extension is an effective technique for reducing accesses to components such as on- and off-chip memories, register file and enhancing the energy efficiency. However, the addition of custom functional units to the base processor is required for supporting custom instructions, which due to the increase of manufacturing and design costs in new nanometer-scale technologies and shorter time-to-market, is becoming an issue. To address above issues, in our proposed approach, an optimized reconfigurable functional unit is used instead, and instruction set customization is done after chip-fabrication. Therefore, while maintaining the flexibility of a conventional microprocessor, the low-energy feature of customization is applicable. Experimental results show that the maximum and average energy savings are 67% and 22%, respectively for our proposed architecture framework.