A Partial Access Mechanism on a Register for Low-Cost Embedded Multimedia ASIP

Ha-young JEONG
Min-young CHO
Won HUR
Yong-surk LEE

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E91-C    No.7    pp.1171-1174
Publication Date: 2008/07/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1093/ietele/e91-c.7.1171
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Integrated Electronics
Keyword: 
embedded processor,  ASIP,  SIMD,  partial access,  

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Summary: 
In this letter, we propose a partial access mechanism to be used on a register file for low-cost embedded multimedia processor architecture. In the embedded system, supporting the SIMD operations is a burden because of the wide SIMD register file and its execution unit. So a new architecture is proposed to increase the performance of SIMD operations with minimal additional hardware overhead. To evaluate the performance and hardware overhead, this architecture is adopted to an embedded multimedia processor and simulated with five DSP benchmarks. The simulation results indicate that the performance is increased by 38% and the total area is increased by 13.4%. The proposed partial access mechanism may be useful for low-cost embedded multimedia ASIP.