Evaluating design trade-offs in customizable processors

The short time-to-market window for embedded systems demands automation of design methodologies for customizable processors. Recent research advances in this direction have mostly focused on single criteria optimization, e.g., optimizing performance though custom instructions under pre-defined area constraint. From the designer's perspective, however, it would be more interesting if the conflicting trade-offs among multiple objectives (e.g., performance versus area) are exposed enabling an informed decision making. Unfortunately, identifying the optimal trade-off points turns out to be computationally intractable. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time approximation algorithm to systematically evaluate the design trade-offs. In particular, we explore performance-area trade-offs in the context of multi-tasking real-time embedded applications to be implemented on a customizable processor.