TTA Processor Synthesis

Due to the decreasing feature size of VLSI technology, the amount of hardware which can be integrated into a single chip increases. As a result, future processor chips can execute tens of operations concurrently. Many applications can profit from these huge amounts of hardware parallelism by designing application specific processors. Two problems emerge however: 1) the design space gets large; it is difficult to chose a satisfactory solution, and 2) the design complexity increases and therefore design cycle gets too long. Solving these problems makes tools for automatic processor design necessary. In this paper we present such a tool. It generates processor layout for so called transport triggered processors. The processor configuration is largely parameterized. A working processor has already been produced using this generator. An important question concerns the quality of automatically generated designs: what do we pay in area and cycle time, when compared to a manual design? In order to answer this question, these two design styles are compared for an almost equal processor configuration.