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The slow-down of Moore¡¯s law and Dennard scaling triggered an increased awareness for application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs). These processors implement a specialized instruction-set architecture (ISA) tailored to the application domain, often starting from a baseline such as the RISC-V ISA.  ASIPs can replace traditional fixed-function hardware accelerators, thereby introducing software-programmability in the acceleration domain, and thus more flexibility and agility in both the design process and the eventual product.  By maintaining a RISC-V ISA baseline, compatibility with and reuse of existing processor ecosystem elements is facilitated. 

Synopsys¡¯ ASIP Designer is the industry-leading tool to design, implement, program and verify application-specific instruction-set processors. Starting from a single processor specification, designers immediately obtain an optimizing C/C++ compiler, cycle-accurate simulator and synthesizable hardware implementation of the ASIP.  Using a unique compiler-in-the-loop? and synthesis-in-the-loop? methodology, the ISA and microarchitecture can be tuned quickly to the application domain. 

This seminar introduces you to the ASIP Designer tool-suite. 

It features two case studies from popular application domains. 

The first case study by Lund University presents an application-specific vector processor for CNN based massive MIMO user terminal positioning. The ASIP contains a scalar RISC processor extended with a vector datapath and integrated accelerators. 

The second case study by Synopsys shows an accelerator for 5G NR channel equalization. A RISC baseline architecture is gradually extended into a highly parallel and specialized ASIP optimized for MMSE channel equalization using Cholesky Decomposition.