CUSTARD - A Customisable Threaded FPGA Soft Processor and Tools

Abstract. We propose CUSTARD — CUStomisable Threaded ARchitecture — a soft processor design space that combines support for multiple hardware threads and automatically generated custom instructions. Multiple threads incur low additional hardware cost and allow fine-grained concurrency without multiple processor cores or software overhead. Custom instructions, generated for a specific application, accelerate frequently performed computations by implementing them as dedicated hardware. In this paper we present a flexible processor and compiler generation system, FPGA implementations of CUSTARD and performance/area results for media and cryptography benchmarks.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FPL
• Authors: Robert G. Dimond, Oskar Mencer, Wayne Luk
• Keywords: FPL 2005, Multiple Hardware Threads, Multiple Processor Cores, Soft Processor Design