Design and Implementation of Application Specific Instruction Set Processor using LISATek Design Methodology

Abstract

An Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP) is widely used as a System on a Chip Component. ASIPs possess an instruction set which is tailored to benefit a specific application. Such specialization allows ASIPs to serve as an intermediate between two dominant processor design styles- ASICs which has high processing abilities at the cost of limited programmability and Programmable solutions such as FPGAs that provide programming flexibility at the cost of less energy efficiency. In this project our goal is to design ASIP, keeping in mind Digital Image and Signal Processing Applications, followed by implementation in hardware (FPGA). The platform used for design is CoWare, which allows processor architecture to be defined at an abstract level and automatic generation of chain of software tools like assembler, linker and simulator for functional verification followed by RTL level description which is to be used for FPGA implementation.