Accelerating the Design of ASIPs and SoCs
Target Compiler Technologies™ invented a novel design paradigm, to accelerate the design of application-specific processors (ASIPs). Thanks to their architectural specialization, combined with instruction-level and data-level parallelism, ASIPs can offer performance and energy characteristics that are superior to general-purpose processors. Thanks to their software programmability, ASIPs offer the flexibility to cope with multiple algorithmic standards and floating specifications. ASIPs form the heart of advanced multi-processor systems-on-chip (SoCs).
Our key innovation is IP Designer, a retargetable tool-suite that allows to design highly optimized ASIPs with performance and energy characteristics that are superior to general-purpose processors. As IP Designer does not use predefined architectural templates, the architectural scope of the tool suite goes well beyond the offering of configurable processor vendors. By designing ASIPs with IP Designer, an essential product differentiation is obtained while expensive royalty streams to third-party processor vendors are avoided.
| KEY FEATURES | BENEFITS | |
| High-level architectural exploration | Designers can define and thoroughly optimize their ASIP architecture and instruction set, to reach the best match of algorithm and hardware resources. Thanks to architectural specialization and parallelism, low-power designs can be targeted. | |
| Generation of software development kit | A complete software development kit (SDK) for the ASIP is obtained quickly, including a highly optimizing C compiler and an instruction-set simulator. The SDK automatically adapts to architectural changes. | |
| Fast and automatic hardware generation | An optimized register-transfer level (RTL) implementation of the ASIP is generated automatically. Low-power RTL optimizations are included. Early and accurate feedback about the ASIP’s area, timing and energy consumption is obtained. | |
| Verification of the ASIP core | JTAG-based on-chip debugging and automatic test-program generation allow for verification of the ASIP implementation. | |
For each ASIP designed and optimised with the IP Designer tool suite, an ASIP-specific Software Development Kit (SDK) can be generated, called IP Programmer. This SDK can be made available to software engineers developing application software for the ASIP. IP Programmer SDKs include ASIP-specific versions of the optimising C compiler, assembler, instruction-set simulator, and on-chip debugger.
For those companies that want to realize the benefits of ASIPs as quickly as possible, Target offers ASIP modeling services to help projects get off the ground quickly.
Typical Markets
SoCs for wireless and wireline telecom, video and multi-media, low-power audio, hearing instruments, personal health care, smart sensors, numerical computing, network processing.