Reconfigurable AGU: An Address Generation Unit Based on Address Calculation Pattern for Low Energy and High Performance Embedded Processors

Ittetsu TANIGUCHI  Praveen RAGHAVAN  Murali JAYAPALA  Francky CATTHOOR  Yoshinori TAKEUCHI  Masaharu IMAI 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E92-A  No.4  pp.1161-1173
Publication Date: 2009/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: VLSI Design Technology and CAD
Keyword: 
address generation unit (AGU),  reconfigurable architecture,  ASIP design,  architecture exploration, 

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Summary: 
Low energy and high performance embedded processor is crucial in the future nomadic embedded systems design. Improvement of memory accesses, especially improvement of spatial and temporal locality is well known technique to reduce energy and increase performance. However, after transformations that improve locality, address calculation often becomes a bottleneck. In this paper, we propose novel AGU (Address Generation Unit) exploration and mapping technique based on a reconfigurable AGU model. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques help exploring AGU architectures effectively and designers can get trade-offs of real life applications for about 10 hours.