Many contemporary servers, personal and laptop computers, and even cell phones are powered by high-performance superscalar processors. In the past, conventional microarchitecture and technology scaling has afforded leaps in their performance and functionality. Today, conventional microarchitecture and technology scaling are both yielding lower returns with increasing costs. Therefore, any microarchitecture level decision to increase performance needs to be critically analyzed from a technology standpoint. To address this critical need, we have developed a register transfer level (RTL) model of a superscalar microarchitecture with similar complexity of a current generation processor. The RTL model is written in Verilog and is fully synthesizable. The model can be implemented in different technology nodes using a well established ASIC design flow to provide high fidelity estimation of propagation delay, power consumption, area, and other technology related costs. The RTL model is supplemented with a register file compiler to estimate the costs of multi-ported memory structures which are extensively used in a superscalar microarchitecture. The RTL model is also tightly integrated with a C++ functional simulator to assist and accelerate verification.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NCSU/oai:NCSU:etd-07082009-161145 |
| Date | 10 August 2009 |
| Creators | Choudhary, Niket Kumar |
| Contributors | W. Rhett Davis, Gregory Byrd, Eric Rotenberg |
| Publisher | NCSU |
| Source Sets | North Carolina State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07082009-161145/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dis sertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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