An Architecture Framework For Application-specific And Scalable Architectures

Two major limitations concerning the design of cost-effective application-specific architectures are the recurrent costs of system-software development and hardware implementation, in particular VLSI implementation, for each architecture. The SCalable ARChitecture Experiment (SCARCE) aims to provide a framework for application-specific processor design. The framework allows scaling of functionality, implementation complexity, and performance. The SCARCE framework consists and will consist of: an architecture framework defining the constraints for the design of application-specific architectures; tools for synthesizing architectures from application or application-area; VLSI cell libraries and tools for quick generation of application-specific processors; a system-software platform which can be retargeted quickly to fit the application-specific architecture; This paper concentrates primarily on the architecture framework of SCARCE, but also presents briefly some software issues and outlines the process of generating VLSI processors.