Accelerating DSP Applications in Embedded Systems with a Coprocessor Data-Path

The execution time improvements achieved in a generic microprocessor system by employing a highperformance data-path are presented. The data-path acts as a coprocessor that accelerates computational intensive kernel regions thereby increasing the overall performance. The data-path has been previously introduced and it is composed by Flexible Computational Components (FCCs) that can realize any two-level template of primitive operations. For evaluating the effectiveness of our coprocessor approach, several real-world DSP applications are mapped to the system. Study of the performance improvements relative to the microprocessor architecture and to the computational resources of the data-path is performed. Significant overall application speedups are reported that range from 1.75 to 3.95, having an average value of 2.72, while the overhead in circuit area is small.