Jong Hee M. Youn , Se Chul Shin , You Heung Park , Jeong Hun Cho

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 16, No. 6, pp. 443-452, Dec. 2009
10.3745/KIPSTA.2009.16.6.443,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Although 32-bit architectures are becoming the norm for modern microprocessors, 16-bit ones are still employed by many low-end processors, for which small size and low power consumption are of high priority. However, 16-bit architectures have a critical disadvantage for embedded processors that they do not provide enough encoding space to add special instructions coined for certain applications. To overcome this, many existing architectures adopt non-orthogonal, irregular instruction sets to accommodate a variety of unusual addressing modes. In general, these non-orthogonal architectures are regarded compiler-unfriendly as they tend to requires extremely sophisticated compiler techniques for optimal code generation. To address this issue, we proposed a compiler-friendly processor with a new addressing mode, called the dynamic implied addressing mode(DIAM). In this paper, we will demonstrate that the DIAM provides more encoding space for our 16-bit processor so that we are able to support more instructions specially customized for our applications. And we will explain the advanced architecture which has improved performance. In our experiment, the proposed architecture shows 11.6% performance increase on average, as compared to the basic architecture.

Statistics
Cite this article