ALU-array based reconfigurable accelerator for energy efficient executions

Abstract

This paper introduces an energy efficient acceleration technique for embedded microprocessors. By means of supporting an ALU-array based coarse-grain reconfigurable functional unit, well customized special instructions are identified and executed for each application program. Since the reconfigurable functional unit can execute several dependent instructions (a sequence of instructions), simultaneously, the performance of the base microprocessor can dramatically be improved. In addition, this kind of direct execution is very energy efficient because it reduces activation counts of hardware components such as instruction cache, branch predictor, register-file accesses, and so on.