Implementation and benchmarking of processor architectures for application-specific instruction set processors for implantable medical devices
J.R.H.R. Smit (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Z. Al-Ars – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
An application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) can provide for higher power and computationalefficiency compared to general-purpose processors. These attributes are essential for implantable medicaldevices which often run computationally intensive tasks on a strict power budget. This thesis compilesa collection of benchmarks by porting the existing benchmark suites ImpBench and CoreMark, and byimplementing a novel benchmark for artificial neural networks. Four architectures are selected in thecomparison; RISC, DSP, VLIW, and TTA. Implementations of these architectures are produced by theASIP Designer and OpenASIP toolsets. The benchmarks are simulated on these implementations andthe power consumption is measured on an FPGA. The thesis concludes that the implementations of theDSP and VLIW architectures do not deliver enough performance for their heavier use of resources, andrecommends a follow-up research by extending the TTA PeLoTTA and RISC-V Tzscale processors withapplication-specific instructions and running simulations for ASIC power and area numbers.