Energy-efficient instruction set synthesis for application-specific processors

Abstract

Several techniques have been proposed to enhance the energy-efficiency of ASIPs (Application-Specific Instruction set Processors). While those techniques can reduce the energy consumption with a minimal change in the instruction set (IS), they fail to exploit the opportunity of designing the entire IS from the energy-efficiency perspective. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient IS synthesis technique that can comprehensively reduce the energy-delay product (EDP) of ASIPs through optimal instruction encoding, considering both the instruction bitwidth and the dynamic instruction count. Experimental results with a typical embedded RISC processor show that our technique can generate application-specific IS's that are up to 40% more energy-efficient over the native IS for several application benchmarks.