Effectiveness of the ASIP design system PEAS-III in design of pipelined processors

In this paper, the effectiveness of the ASIP (Application Specific Instruction set Processor) design system PEAS-III is evaluated through experiments. Examples in experiments are a MIPS R3000 compatible processor, DLX, a simple RISC controller, and PEAS-I core. While they are simple in-order pipelined processors, they have enough facilities for real embedded system design. Through experiments, easiness of design and modification for improvement and design quality in terms of performance and hardware cost are discussed. It has been confirmed that the design method used in PEAS-III is effective to design space exploration for simple pipelined processors.