Nowadays, many ASIP systems with high computational capabilities are designed in order to fulfill the increasing demands of technical applications. However, the design of ASIP system usually takes many man hours. Therefore, a number of EDA tools are developed to ease the design effort, but they limit the design freedom due to their predefined design templates. Consequently, designers are forced to use lower level HDLs which offer high design flexibility but require substantial design hours. A novel design automation tool called NoGap was proposed to balance such issues. The NoGap system, which is especially used in ASIPs and accelerator design, effectively provides high design flexibility and saves design effort for designers. The efficiency and design ability of NoGap were investigated in this thesis work. NoGap was used to implement an eight-way SIMD datapath of an ASIP called Sleipnir, which was devised by the Division of Computer Engineering at Linköping University. For contrast, the manually crafted HDL implementation of the Sleipnir was taken. The critical path implementations, done by both design approaches, were synthesized to the Altera Strtix IV FPGA. The synthesize results showed that the NoGap design although used 1.358 times as many hardware units as the original HDL design. Their timing performance is comparable (HDL/NoGap-60.042/58.156Mhz). In this thesis, based on the design experience of SIMD datapath, valuable aspects were suggested to benefit the future users who will use NoGap to implement SIMD structures. In addition, the hidden bugs and insufficient features of NoGap were discovered, and the referable suggestions were provided in order to help the developers to improve the NoGap system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-72131 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Chan, Chun-Jung |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för systemteknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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