Verification of instruction set specification for an ASIP

In order to gain the great performance of ASIP, this paper discusses different aspects of an ASIP instruction set specification like syntax, encoding, constraints as welt as behaviors, and introduces our ADL model based methodology to check them. The automatic generation of test cases based on our straight-forward instruction representation is shown, and the efficient generation of them with good coverage is shown as well. The verification of the constraint checker, a very important tool for programmer, is performed. Results show that the toolkit can find some errors in previous delivery tools, and the introduced methodology verifies the feasibility of our instruction set specification.

A TSE based design for MMSE and QRD of MIMO systems based on ASIP

A Taylor series expansion(TSE) based design for minimum mean-square error(MMSE) and QR decomposition(QRD) of multi-input and multi-output(MIMO) systems is proposed based on application specific instruction set processor(ASIP), which uses TSE algorithm instead of resource-consuming reciprocal and reciprocal square root(RSR) operations.The aim is to give a high performance implementation for MMSE and QRD in one programmable platform simultaneously.Furthermore, instruction set architecture(ISA) and the allocation of data paths in single instruction multiple data-very long instruction word(SIMD-VLIW) architecture are provided, offering more data parallelism and instruction parallelism for different dimension matrices and operation types.Meanwhile, multiple level numerical precision can be achieved with flexible table size and expansion order in TSE ISA.The ASIP has been implemented to a 28 nm CMOS process and frequency reaches 800 MHz.Experimental results show that the proposed design provides perfect numerical precision within the fixed bit-width of the ASIP, higher matrix processing rate better than the requirements of 5G system and more rate-area efficiency comparable with ASIC implementations.