C-slow Technique vs Multiprocessor in designing Low Area Customized Instruction set Processor for Embedded Applications

Abstract: The demand for high performance embedded processors, for consumer electronics, is rapidly increasing for the past few years. Many of these embedded processors depend upon custom built Instruction Ser Architecture (ISA) such as game processor (GPU), multimedia processors, DSP processors etc. Primary requirement for consumer electronic industry is low cost with high performance and low power consumption. A lot of research has been evolved to enhance the performance of embedded processors through parallel computing. But some of them focus superscalar processors i.e. single processors with more resources like Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) which includes Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture, custom instruction set extensible processor architecture and others require more number of processing units on a single chip like Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) that includes Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), Chip Multithreading (CMT) and Chip Multiprocessing (CMP). In this paper, we present a new technique, named C-slow, to enhance performance for embedded processors for consumer electronics by exploiting multithreading technique in single core processors. Without resulting into the complexity of micro controlling with Real Time Operating system (RTOS), C-slowed processor can execute multiple threads in parallel using single datapath of Instruction Set processing element. This technique takes low area & approach complexity of general purpose processor running RTOS.