Implementation and Evaluation of Packed-SIMD Instructions for a RISC-V Processor

With the increase in the amount of data being gathered, the need for data processing is also rising. Furthermore, in addition to the proprietary ISAs that have been prevalent, the free and open RISC-V ISA has seen major interest. The modularity of the RISC-V ISA allows it to be extended with many instruction set extensions. One such extension...

Dynamically Reconfigurable Fault-Tolerant Design of r-VEX Softcore Processor

Over the past many years, technology scaling has resulted in a continuous reduction of lateral and vertical dimensions of transistors. The technology scaling, on the one hand, has led to a commensurate performance gain for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits, but on the other hand, has also made such circuits more vulnerable to ionizing...

Performance Estimation of a Processor Module in the Real-Time Motion Control Platform of an ASML Lithostepper

At the core of state of the art microelectronic industry's drive for better technology, lies the continuing advancement in the development of Integrated Circuits using highly complex lithography machines, known as lithosteppers, which embed complex mechanical sub-systems performing intricate motions. <br/>These systems are controlled by means of...

Accelerating Software Pipelines Using Streaming Caches

The trend of increasing performance by parallelism is followed by the adoption of heterogeneous systems. In order to allow more fine-tuned balancing between used thread- and instruction level parallelism, the heterogeneous ρ-VEX platform was developed. Pipelining has been a part of microprocessor development for decades to increase throughput of...

Streaming FPGA Based Multiprocessor Architecture for Low latency Medical Image Processing

In this work a fast and efficient implementation of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based, fixed hardware, streaming multiprocessor architecture for low latency medical image processing is introduced. The design of this computation fabric is based on the ρ-VEX Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) softcore processor and is in influenced by...

SIMD Floating Point Extension for Ray Tracing

In the last decade, the importance of graphics capabilities have become very important in the mobile market. As a result low power embedded solutions for mobile devices have been eveloped to run computationally intensive graphics applications, which extensively uses floating point calculations. The work proposed in this thesis target the...