Sub-operation parallelism optimization in SIMD processor core synthesis

A b-bit SIMD functional unit has n k-bit sub-functional units in itself, where b = k × n. It can execute n-parallel k-bit operations. However, all the b-bit functional units in a processor core do not necessarily execute n-parallel operations. Depending on an application program, some of them just execute n/2-parallel operations or even n/4-parallel operations. This means that we can modify a b-bit SIMD functional unit so that it has n/2 k-bit sub-functional units or n/4 k-bit sub-functional units. The number of k-bit sub-functional units in a SIMD functional unit is called sub-operation parallelism. We incorporate a sub-operation parallelism optimization algorithm into SIMD functional unit optimization. Our proposed algorithm gradually reduces sub-operation parallelism of a SIMD functional unit while the timing constraint of execution time satisfied. Thereby, we can finally find a processor core with small area under the given timing constraint. We expect that we can obtain processor core configurations of smaller area in the same timing constraint rather than a conventional system. The promising experimental results are also shown.