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Yaohua WANG Shuming CHEN Hu CHEN Jianghua WAN Kai ZHANG Sheng LIU
The efficiency of ubiquitous SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) media processors is seriously limited by the bottleneck effect of the scalar kernels in media applications. To solve this problem, a dual-core framework, composed of a micro control unit and an instruction buffer, is proposed. This framework can dynamically decouple the scalar and vector pipelines of the original single-core SIMD architecture into two free-running cores. Thus, the bottleneck effect can be eliminated by effectively exploiting the parallelism between scalar and vector kernels. The dual-core framework achieves the best attributes of both single-core and dual-core SIMD architectures. Experimental results exhibit an average performance improvement of 33%, at an area overhead of 4.26%. What's more, with the increase of the SIMD width, higher performance gain and lower cost can be expected.
Shinya KAJIYAMA Masamichi FUJITO Hideo KASAI Makoto MIZUNO Takanori YAMAGUCHI Yutaka SHINAGAWA
A novel 300 MHz embedded flash memory for dual-core microcontrollers with a shared ROM architecture is proposed. One of its features is a three-stage pipeline read operation, which enables reduced access pitch and therefore reduces performance penalty due to conflict of shared ROM accesses. Another feature is a highly sensitive sense amplifier that achieves efficient pipeline operation with two-cycle latency one-cycle pitch as a result of a shortened sense time of 0.63 ns. The combination of the pipeline architecture and proposed sense amplifiers significantly reduces access-conflict penalties with shared ROM and enhances performance of 32-bit RISC dual-core microcontrollers by 30%.