EIC's Message: General-purpose versus application-specific processors

EIC's Message: Do You Really Know What You Know?

Reconfigurable Architectures

In the area of computer architecture, designers are faced with the trade-of between flexibility and performance. The architectural choices span a wide spectrum, with general-purpose processors and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) at opposite ends. General-purpose processors are not optimized to specific applications, they are flexible due to their versatile instruction sets that...

A Scalable VLSI MIMD Routing Cell

It is a well known fact that full custom designed computer architectures can achieve much higher performance for specific applications than general purpose computers. This performance has to be paid for: a long design trajectory results in a high cost-performance ratio. Current VLSI design and compilation tools however, make semi-custom designs feasible with greatly reduced costs and time to ma...

Designing High Quality, Scaleable SoC??s with Heterogeneous Components

Today’s SoC’s combine an increasingly wide range of heterogenous processing elements, consisting of general purpose RISC’s, DSP’s, application-specific processors, and fixed or configurable hardware. Five to ten processors on an SoC is now common. A bottom-up assembly of these heterogeneous components using an ad-hoc interconnect topology, different instruction sets and embedded S/W development...

Reconfigurable Systems for Cryptography and Multimedia Applications

The area of reconfigurable computing has received considerable interest in both its forms: fine-grained (represented in FPGA) and coarse-grained architectures. Both architecture styles attempt to combine two of the important traits of General Purpose Processors (GPPs) and Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs): flexibility and speed (Hartenstein, 2001). It provides performance close t...