• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.397-400
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• 2009

This paper describes ASIC design of Multimedia application SoC platform based RISC processor with BTB(Branch Target Buffer). For performance enhancement of platform, we use a simple branch prediction scheme, BTB structure, that stores a target address for branch instruction to remove pipeline harzard. Also, the platform includes a number of peripheral such as VGA controller, AC97 controller, UART controller, SRAM interface and Debug interface. The platform is designed and verified on a Xilinx VERTEX-4 FPGA using a number of test programs for functional tests and timing constraints. Finally, the platform is implemented into a single ASIC chip which can be operated at 100MHz clock frequency using the Chartered 0.18um process. As a result of performance estimation, the proposed platform shows about 5~9% performance improvement in comparison with the previous SoC Platform.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.25 no.11B
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• pp.1939-1947
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• 2000

본 논문에서는 명령어의 효율적인 페치를 위해 분기 타겟 주소 전체를 사용하지 않고 캐쉬 메모리(cache memory) 내의 적은 비트 수로 인덱싱 하여 한 클럭 사이클 안에 최대 4개의 명령어를 다음 파이프라인으로 보내줄 수 있는 방법을 제시한다. 본 프리페치 유닛은 크게 나누어 3개의 영역으로 나눌 수 있는데, 분기에 관련하여 미리 부분적으로 명령어를 디코드 하는 프리디코드(predecode) 블록, 타겟 주소(NTA : Next Target Address) 테이블 영역을 추가시킨 명령어 캐쉬(instruction cache) 블록, 전체 유닛을 제어하고 가상 주소를 관리하는 프리페치(prefetch) 블록으로 나누어진다. 사용된 명령어들은 SPARC(Scalable Processor ARChitecture) V9에 기준 하였고 구현은 Verilog-HDL(Hardwave Description Language)을 사용하여 기능 수준으로 기술되고 검증되었다. 구현된 프리페치 유닛은 명령어 흐름에 분기가 존재하더라도 단일 사이클 안에 4개까지의 명령어들을 정확한 예측 하에 다음 파이프라인으로 보내줄 수 있다. 또한 NTA를 사용한 방법은 같은 수의 레지스터 비트를 사용하였을 때 BTB(Branch Target Buffer)를 사용하는 방법과 비교하여 2배정도 많은 개수의 분기 명령 주소를 저장할 수 있는 장점이 있다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.899-902
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• 2005

Pipeline hazard due to branch instructions is the major factor of the degradation on the performance of microprocessors. Branch target buffer predicts whether a branch will be taken or not and supplies the address of the next instruction on the basis of that prediction. If the branch target buffer predicts correctly, the instruction flow will not be stalled. This leads to the better performance of microprocessor. In this paper, the architecture of a tag memory that branch target buffer and TLB can share is presented. Because the two tag memories used for branch target buffer and TLB each is replaced by single shared tag memory, we can expect the smaller ship size and the faster prediction. This hared tag architecture is more advantageous for the microprocessors that uses more bits of address and exploits much more instruction level parallelism.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.1-13
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• 2009

Filter cache has been introduced as one solution of reducing cache power consumption. More than 50% of the power reduction results from the filter cache, whereas more than 20% of the performance is compromised. To minimize the performance degradation of the filter cache, the predictive filter cache has been proposed. In this paper, we review the previous filter cache predictors and analyze the problems of the solutions. As a result, we found main problems that cause prediction misses in previous filter cache schemes and, to resolve the problems, this paper proposes a new prediction policy. In our scheme, some reference bit entries, called MSBs, are inserted into filter cache and BTB, to adaptively control the filter cache access. In simulation parts, we use a modified SimpleScalar simulator with MiBench benchmark programs to verify the proposed filter cache. The simulation result shows in average 5% performance improvement, compared to previous ones.