Press Releases
CriticalBlue Adds Streaming Architectural Option to Cascade Coprocessor Synthesis
Synthesizes Autonomous Coprocessors to Achieve System Level Performance and Power Consumption Goals
San Jose, California - June 6, 2005 - CriticalBlue, a provider of tools for accelerating software in embedded microprocessor applications, has announced a streaming coprocessor capability within its Cascade coprocessor synthesis design environment. Streaming allows autonomous transfer of data into and out of the coprocessor with minimum main central processor unit (CPU) interaction, freeing the CPU to execute other tasks.
"It has become clear that applications requiring programmable coprocessors must deliver more than just parallel processing structures. The ability to provide a coprocessor with an optimal memory access mechanism is vital to achieving system level performance and power consumption goals, commented David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. "In particular, most audio and video functions are excellent offload candidates to a streaming coprocessor, enabling the main processor to continue with other tasks."
Cascade currently enables designers to offload embedded software functionality directly from the main processor onto a programmable coprocessor, which is optimized to meet user-defined performance and resource usage constraints. The new capability allows designers to select an autonomous streaming coprocessor implementation for applications where continuous streams of data are processed by the offloaded functions. In such cases, a streaming architecture is ideally suited to achieving the optimal system performance in terms of data throughput and power consumption.
"We used Cascade to develop customizable coprocessors, which we previously created manually, guided by public domain C reference implementations of the required algorithms," said Qasim Shami, Director of the Engineering, Communication Division, LSI Logic, "Cascade generated processors from this same unmodified C code in one-tenth the development time, compared to the manual approach, and achieved our product performance goals. Cascade has taken a significant step forward in the automation of software-derived customizable coprocessors."
Streaming Coprocessors
Streaming coprocessors use significantly less silicon area because of their reduced usage of hardware resources. A significant part of this is due to the coprocessors' use of a DMA scheme, simplifying main memory interaction and, subsequently, the bus interface logic. The ability to directly access streaming memory blocks enables the direct placement of data items that are constantly local to the coprocessor. This allows the extensive application of data width parameterization to both addresses and data.
Once a Cascade user has selected a streaming coprocessor architecture, they then nominate which input and output parameters should be treated as streams. Cascade automatically generates the hardware and software interfaces necessary to communicate with a pre-existing DMA controller. This is critical, as DMA transfers are initiated transparently at run time whenever an offloaded function is invoked. The coprocessor then controls the flow of data as required. No special streaming constructs are required, providing compatibility with the existing embedded software implementations.
Streaming may be specified at the top level of a call tree of functions to be offloaded, but called functions may employ the unrestricted memory access style typical of embedded software applications. Cascade performs automatic analysis of the data access patterns in the code and generates an optimized memory architecture within the coprocessor to provide an automatic data prefetch and buffering capability that 'hides' memory latency. The streaming coprocessor architecture has far fewer control logic requirements than a standard non-streaming coprocessor, and utilizes up to 30% fewer gates.
"Memory coherency and communication latency issues are the primary reasons why programmable processors that are developed from partitioned code, in isolation, fail to deliver the anticipated performance once they are integrated into an SoC platform," commented Richard Taylor, CTO, CriticalBlue. "Since Cascade creates its coprocessors using the application software, it can accurately predict data-dependent memory access behavior and help navigate the user towards the optimal blend of datapath, control, and memory access structures."
Availability
The streaming coprocessor feature will be available 2H2005. For more information, please contact info@criticalblue.com.
About CriticalBlue
CriticalBlue provides system and semiconductor design companies with flexible, automated embedded system design solutions that meet the increasing performance, area, power, and cost demands of embedded software processing. The company's Cascade solution automatically synthesizes a programmable coprocessor or streaming coprocessor optimized to accelerate software offloaded from the main processor. Designers can perform a comprehensive design space exploration to identify the optimum solution by either co-optimizing the software with the coprocessor architecture, or simply generating the optimum coprocessor architecture for unmodified software.
For more information or a product demo visit CriticalBlue at the Design Automation Conference (www.dac.com) at Booth 1033 or visit www.criticalblue.com.
About LSI Logic Corporation
LSI Logic Corporation (NYSE: LSI) focuses on the design and production of high-performance semiconductors for Consumer, Communications and Storage applications that access, interconnect and store data, voice and video. LSI Logic engineers incorporate reusable, industry-standard intellectual property building blocks that serve as the heart of leading-edge systems. LSI Logic serves its global OEM and channel customers with Platform ASICs, standard-cell ASICs, standard products, host bus adapters, RAID controllers and software. In addition, the company supplies storage network solutions for the enterprise. LSI Logic is headquartered at 1621 Barber Lane, Milpitas, CA 95035. www.lsilogic.com.
For more information, please contact:
David Stewart
CriticalBlue
+1 408 467 5091
Leslie Cumming
Skye Marketing Communications
+ 1 415 285 2352