Software Configurable Processors – The Stretch S6000 Line
When designing a system, the best performance is often reached by using an ASIC, you can customize it to your design and tweak it for maximum performance. This, however, adds costly development time, and little flexiblility. You could use a general purpose processor; this saves dev time, and cost, but at the expense of performance. What if you could have both? Off the shelf processor technology, AND customizable speed.
You can. This is what Software Configurable Processors are designed for. In simple terms they are a standard CPU core, wrapped in a FPGA. This way istructions for the processort can be configured for maximun speed. If you have a function in your code that is repetitive, it can be reduced to a single instruction for the processor.
One of the leaders in Software Configurable Processors is called Stretch. Their S6000 line of processors use a Tensilica Xtensa core (a VLIW RISC design), wrapped in a custom FPGA. In this way the RISC core can be programmaed on the fly, providing much faster performance then a normal processor, or DSP.
February 8th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
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