Design of Low-Gate-Count Low-Power Microprocessors with High Code Density for Deeply Embedded Applications

Deeply embedded applications demand small area, low power, high code density, and low design complexity for high adaptability. Both a 16-bit microprocessor with a 4G byte linear memory space and a 4-bit processor are proposed and designed to achieve these goals. Hardware reuse and sharing, multicycle architecture, compact instruction set architecture, and counter-based instruction decoder are utilized to reduce gate count. As a result, gate count and power dissipation of the synthesized ASIC gate-level netlists of 16-bit and 4-bit processors are less than 14,000, 1,490, 0.5[Formula: see text]m W, and 0.06[Formula: see text]m W, respectively, at 10[Formula: see text]MHz in a 0.18[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m digital CMOS technology. The proposed 16-bit and 32-bit processors are extendable instruction set computers whose high code density is demonstrated to reduce code bytes by 40% over a reduced instruction set computer. The pipelined EISC processor only consumes 50[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]W/MHz with 10,800 gates in a 0.18[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m CMOS process.

CODE COMPRESSION FOR THE EMBEDDED ARM/THUMB PROCESSOR

Previous code compression research on embedded systems was based on typical RISC instruction code. THUMB from ARM Ltd is a compacted 16-bits instruction set showing a great code density than its original 32-bits ARM instruction. Our research shows that THUMB code is compressible and a further 10-15% code size reduction on THUMB code can be expected using our proposed new architecture – Code Compressed THUMB Processor. In our proposal, Level 2 cache or additional RAM space is introduced to serve as the temporary storage for decompressed program blocks. A software implementation of the architecture is proposed and we have implemented a software prototype based on ARM922T processor, which runs on the ARMulator.