Software pipelining support for transport triggered architecture processors

Abstract

Many telecommunication applications, especially baseband processing, and digital signal processing (DSP) applications call for high-performance implementations due to the complexity of algorithms and high throughput requirements. In general, the required performance is obtained with the aid of parallel computational resources. In these application domains, software implementations are often preferred over fixed-function ASICs due to the flexibility and ease of development. Application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) architectures can be used to exploit efficiently the inherent parallelism of the algorithms but still maintaining the flexibility. Use of high-level languages to program processor architectures with parallel resources can lead to inefficient resource utilization and, on the other hand, parallel assembly programming is error prone and tedious. In this paper, the inherent problems of parallel programming and software pipelining are mitigated with parallel language syntax and automatic generation of software pipelined code for the iteration kernels. With the aid of the developed tool support, the underlying performance of a processor architecture with parallel resources can be exploited and full utilization of the main processing resources is obtained for pipelined loop kernels. The given examples show that efficiency can be obtained without reducing the performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.