SYNTHESIS OF DEDICATED SIMD PROCESSORS

In this paper, a synthesis method (CAPSYS) of dedicated architectures is introduced. Its aim is to produce optimized systems derived from th e algorithmic expression of a numerical application. The approach addr esses the design of dedicated systems for applications that require hi gh numerical computations. An efficient utilization of hardware resour ces is achieved through the use of vector processing with an SIMD impl ementation. The synthesis algorithm realizes simultaneously the design of SIMD structures and the generation of the microcode needed for imp lementing a software pipelining of operations of the source program. C APSYS considers a generic model composed of both mechanisms required t o manage the flow of controls in a SIMD machine and the description of a parallel data memory. All the synthesized architectures derive from this generic model. Capabilities of CAPSYS are illustrated through th e design of an image convolution processor and a two-dimensional media n filtering processor. This last example shows also an interesting fea ture of CAPSYS which permits to instantiate dedicated hardware compone nts in the program of the target application: a hardware realization o f conditional schemes in loops allows to get an efficient vectorizatio n of the algorithm and an efficient dedicated architecture.