Programmable Hardware Accelerators Made Easy: Implementing Custom Processors without Compromising Performance, Power or Area

Overview:
Dealing with change has become more important than ever—whether you need to support a new emerging standard or respond to new functionality that your competition just released. And, designers also need to deal with growing performance and power efficiency demands while meeting time-to-market pressure.

So what about trading fixed hardware implementations for a programmable hardware accelerator? Is it possible to design such a programmable hardware that is flexible enough to deal with multiple standards and different use cases, while meeting power, performance and area constraints?

In this session, you will learn how custom processors or ASIP (Application Specific Instruction-set Processors) can provide the right trade-off between flexibility and power, performance and area requirements. You will also learn how Synopsys Processor Designer greatly eases the implementation and verification of a custom processor by enabling the creation of the optimized RTL code, software tools such as assembler, linker, compiler and instruction-set simulator as well as a SystemC model from a single formal input specification.

What you will learn:

• Motivation for creation and development of custom processors
• Custom processor requirements and development challenges
• How Synopsys Processor Designer can meet the requirements and overcome the challenges of custom processor development
• Demonstration of implementing a custom processor to replace fixed hardware

• Hardware engineers who are working on complex blocks that need to support multiple standards and/or modes
• Hardware engineers who are working on complex control logic
• Architects who want to make their design more scalable or evaluate a hardware accelerator in a system context
• Processor designers who want to perform architectural analysis quickly with performance, power and area taken into account while not worrying about creating software tools manually

Presenter:
Drew Taussig, Corporate Applications Engineer, Synopsys
Drew Taussig is a Corporate Applications Engineer in the Systems Group at Synopsys, supporting Processor Designer. Drew came to Synopsys from CoWare as part of the Processor Designer Product Team. Prior to CoWare, Drew led the ASIC Systems Architecture Team at Philips Semiconductors (now NXP). Drew has a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.