Hardware Support for Arbitrarily Complex Loop Structures in Embedded Applications

摘要

In this paper, the program control unit of an embedded RISC processor isenhanced with a novel zero-overhead loop controller (ZOLC) supporting arbitraryloop structures with multiple-entry/exit nodes. The ZOLC has been incorporatedto an open RISC processor core to evaluate the performance of the proposed unitfor alternative configurations of the selected processor. It is proven thatspeed improvements of 8.4% to 48.2% are feasible for the used benchmarks.