A Customized Cross-Bar for Data-Shuffling in Domain-Specific SIMD Processors

Shuffle operations are one of the most common operations in SIMD based embedded system architectures. In this paper we study different families of shuffle operations that frequently occur in embedded applications running on SIMD architectures. These shuffle operations are used to drive the design of a custom shuffler for domain-specific SIMD processors. The energy efficiency of various crossbar based custom shufflers is analyzed and compared with the widely used full crossbar. We show that by customizing the crossbar to implement specific shuffle operations required in the target application domain, we can reduce the energy consumption of shuffle operations by up to 80%. We also illustrate the tradeoffs between flexibility and energy efficiency of custom shufflers and show that customization offers reasonable benefits without compromising the flexibility required for the target application domain.