Optimizing the Integration Area and Performance of VLIW Architectures by Hardware/Software Co-design

The cost and the performance are major concerns that the designers of embedded processors shall take into account, especially for market considerations. In order to reduce the cost, embedded systems rely on simple hardware architectures like VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processors and they look for compiler support. This paper aims at developing a design space explorer of VLIW architectures from different perspectives like processing performance and integration area. A multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to find the optimum hardware configuration of an embedded system and the optimization rules applied by compiler on the benchmarks code. The first step consisted in represen…