Creating specialized architectures with processor design automation

By _Codasip Blog

August 29, 2022

With semiconductor scaling slowing down if not failing, SoC designers are challenged to find ways of meeting the demand for greater computational performance. In their 2018 Turing lecture, Hennessey & Patterson pointed out that new methods are needed to work around failing scaling and predicted ‘A Golden Age for Computer Architecture’. A key approach in addressing this challenge is to innovate architecturally and to create more specialized processing units – domain-specific processors and accelerators.

If you haven’t already, I recommend reading our white paper on semiconductor scaling and what is next for processors.

Automation for creating application-specific processors

Traditionally custom cores were developed by manually creating an instruction set simulator (ISS), software toolchain, and RTL. This process can be time-consuming and error prone. The alternative is to describe the processor core in a high-level language and to use processor design automation to generate the ISS, software toolchain, RTL and verification environment.

This is exactly what Codasip offers. Codasip Studio is our unique processor design automation toolset. It has been applied to RISC, DSP, and VLIW designs, and we use it for developing our own RISC-V cores. Processors are described using the CodAL architectural language which covers both instruction accurate (IA) and cycle accurate (CA) descriptions.

Specialized processor cores are, by definition, going to vary a lot depending on their workload. Some may be readily developed by customizing existing RISC-V processor cores. However, that approach will not work in every instance and sometimes developing a novel architecture may be necessary. In such cases it will be necessary to explore the instruction set architecture (ISA) and microarchitecture to find a good design solution.

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