Run-time system for an extensible embedded processor with dynamic instruction set

One of the upcoming challenges in embedded processing is to incorporate an increasing amount of adaptivity in order to respond to the multifarious constraints induced by today's embedded systems that feature complex and diverse application behaviors. We present a novel concept (evaluated with a hardware prototype) that moves traditional design-time jobs to run time in order to increase efficiency (in this paper we focus on performance). Adaptivity is achieved dynamically through what we call Special Instructions (SIs) which may change during run time according to non-predictable application behavior. The new contribution of this paper is the principal component that actually makes the entire embedded processor work efficiently, namely the "Special Instruction Scheduler". It determines during run time 'when' and 'how' Special Instructions are composed and executed. We achieve a 2.38x performance increase over a reconfigurable processor system with dynamic instruction set (Molen [19]). Our whole platform consists of a toolchain including estimation and simulation tools plus a running hardware prototype. Throughout this paper, we discuss the functionality by means of an H.264 video encoder in detail even though the concept is not limited to this application.