Design of Energy-Efficient Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors

Rating:
Summary: Good overview of ASIP design and design methodology
Review: I am a hardware engineer in a fabless semicon company.
For our latest project, we had to implement a design unit
in a complex SoC. We implemented this unit as an ASIP using
a special purpose instruction set, which enabled us to support
various modes of operation by just changing the program code.
I think many hardware engineers have already used this concept
(many of them probably w/o even being aware, that they are
designing ASIPs).

The book of Glokler/Meyr gives a lot of theoretical background
for an ASIP project, starting from the datapath design for
signal processing and ending up with instruction issuing/encoding concepts.
Many of these concepts are covered in standard computer architecture books.
However, this book does not only focus on high level instruction
set definition, but also on the VLSI implementation of it and
on performance/power. It becomes obvious, that successful
ASIPs do not need to be very complicated, but still can be
energy efficient and computationally powerful.

What I liked most about this book is the fact that the
author does not tell you a lot of high level stuff. Instead, he
uses many examples and figures to illustrate possible design
alternatives.


In summary, this book has given me a lot of new ideas on what I
can do better in future ASIP projects!