• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.699-707
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• 2016

This paper proposes a low-complexity central processing unit (CPU) that is suitable for deeply embedded systems, including Internet of things (IoT) applications. The core features a 16-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) that leads to high code density, as well as a multicycle architecture with a counter-based control unit and adder sharing that lead to a small hardware area. A co-processor, instruction cache, AMBA bus, internal SRAM, external memory, on-chip debugger (OCD), and peripheral I/Os are placed around the core to make a system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform. This platform is based on a modified Harvard architecture to facilitate memory access by reducing the number of access clock cycles. The SoC platform and CPU were simulated and verified at the C and the assembly levels, and FPGA prototyping with integrated logic analysis was carried out. The CPU was synthesized at the ASIC front-end gate netlist level using a $0.18{\mu}m$ digital CMOS technology with 1.8V supply, resulting in a gate count of merely 7700 at a 50MHz clock speed. The SoC platform was embedded in an FPGA on a miniature board and applied to deeply embedded IoT applications.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.64-71
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• 2010

Recently, to achieve high performance of the processor, the cache is splits physically into two parts, one for instruction and one for data. This paper proposes an architecture of asynchronous instruction cache based on mixed-delay model that are DI(delay-insensitive) model for cache hit and Bundled delay model for cache miss. We synthesized the instruction cache at gate-level and constructed a test platform with 32-bit embedded processor EISC to evaluate performance. The cache communicates with the main memory and CPU using 4-phase hand-shake protocol. It has a 8-KB, 4-way set associative memory that employs Pseudo-LRU replacement algorithm. As the results, the designed cache shows 99% cache hit ratio and reduced latency to 68% tested on the platform with MI bench mark programs.