RETARGETABLE CODE GENERATION FOR DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSORS

Transcription

1 RETARGETABLE CODE GENERATION FOR DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSORS

2 RETARGETABLE CODE GENERATION FOR DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSORS Rainer LEUPERS University of Dortmund Department of Computer Science Dortmund, Germany Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.

3 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Printed an acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1997 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, inciuding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

4 CONTENTS FOREWORD PREFACE Vll lx 1 INTRODUCTION Design automation for VLSI HW /SW codesign of embedded systems Embedded software development DSP algorithms and architectures Problems and solution approach Overview of related work Goals and outline of the book 27 2 PROCESSOR MODELLING MIMOLA language elements The MSSQ compiler Application studies 36 3 INSTRUCTION-SET EXTRACTION Processor description styles Analysis of control signals Binary decision diagrams Instruction-set model Internal processor model Behavioral analysis Structural analysis Postprocessing 78 v

5 Vl RETARGETABLE CODE GENERATION FOR DSPs 3.9 Experimental results ISE as a validation procedure 82 4 CODE GENERATION rrarget architecture styles Program representations Related work rrhe code generation procedure DFL language elements Intermediate representation Code selection by tree parsing Rrr scheduling INSTRUCTION-LEVEL PARALLELISM Address generation in DSPs Generic AGU model Addressing scalar variables Arrays and delay lines Code compaction THE RECORD COMPILER Retargetability Code quality CONCLUSIONS Contributions of this book Future research 193 REFERENCES 195 INDEX 207

6 FOREWORD According to market analysts, the market for consumer electronics will continue to grow at a rate higher than that of electronic systems in general. The consumer market can be characterized by rapidly growing complexities of applications and a rather short market window. As a result, more and more complex designs have to be completed in shrinking time frames. A key concept for coping with such stringent requirements is re-use. Since the re-use of completely fixed large hardware blocks is limited to subproblems of system-level applications (for example MPEG-2), flexible, programmable processors are being used as building blocks for more and more designs. Processors provide a unique combination offeatures: they provide flexibility and re-use. The processors used in consumer electronics are, however, in many cases different from those that are used for screen and keyboard-based equipment, such as PCs. For the consumer market in particular, efficiency of the product plays a dominating role. Hence, processor architectures for these applications are usually highly-optimized and tailored towards a certain application domain. Efficiency is more important than other characteristics, such as regularity or orthogonality. For example, multiply-accumulate instructions are very important for digital signal processing (DSP). Most DSP processors use a special register (the accumulator) for storing partial sums. Orthogonality would require any register to be usable for partial sums, but this would possibly require another register field in the instruction and potentially lengthen the critical path for that instruction. In the light of the importance of efficiency, compiler techniques should be extended to handle features that contribute. to the efficiency of embedded processors. The contribution by Rainer Leupers is one of the few recent contributions aiming at providing efficient (in the sense of efficient code) compilers for embedded processors. These contributions show that efficient compilation is feasible, if the special characteristics of certain application domains (such as DSP) are exploited. Vll

7 Vlll RETARGETABLE CODE GENERATION FOR DSPs In this contribution, Rainer Leupers describes, how code generators for compiling DSP programs onto DSP processors can be built. The work includes a number of optimization algorithms which aim at making high-level programming for DSP applications practical. It can be expected that these and similar optimizations will be included in many future compilers for DSP processors. It can also be expected that the whole area of optimizing techniques will receive an enormous attention in the future, possibly also stimulated by Leupers' contribution. A key aspect ofthe approach developed by Rainer Leupers is the automatic generation of code generators from hard~are descriptions of the target processor. Hence, retargetability is achieved. Retargetability is the ability of quickly generating new tools for new target processors. Why is retargetability desirable? Due to the interest in efficient processors, domain or even application-specific processors are of interest. This means that a significant number of different architectures and instructions sets is expected to exist. Retargetability makes the generation of compilers for these architectures economically feasible. In the approach developed by Leupers, compilers can be generated from a description in a hardware description language. This approach is hence the first that really bridges the gap between ECAD and compiler worlds. This reduces the amount of component models that are required and enables new applications such as analyzing the effect of hardware changes with respect to different cost and performance metrics. This also enables a better understanding of the software /hard ware interface. According to common belief retargetable compilers are not as efficient as targetspecific compilers. Nevertheless, Leupers' RECORD compiler outperforms a target-specific compiler for a standard DSP on the majority of the benchmark examples. The design of the compiler generation system required background knowledge about similar previous work. Some of this knowledge was available in the department Leupers was affiliated with. Much of this knowledge came from earlier projects on compiler generators. Some key concepts such as the concepts of instruction conflicts and alternative code covers could be kept. A huge amount of others are new. It therefore makes me, happy to know that these solutions will be generally available in the form of this book. Dortmund, April 1997 P. Marwedel

8 PREFACE This book responds to the demand for a new class of CAD tools for embedded VLSI systems, located at the edge between software compilation and hardware design. Compilation of efficient machine code for embedded processors cannot be done without a close view of the underlying hardware architecture. In particular this holds for digital signal processors (DSPs), which show highly specialized architectures and instruction sets. Very few attention has been paid so far to development of high-level language compilers for DSPs, which is also-expressed in the following statement by Hennessy and Patterson [HePa90]: "Digital signal processors are not derived from the traditional model of computing, and tend to look like horizontal microprogrammed machines or VLIW machines. They tend to solve real~ time problems, essentially having an infinite-input data stream. There has been little emphasis on compiling from programming languages such as C, but that is starting to change. As DSPs bend to the demands of programming languages, it will be interesting to see how they differ from traditional microprocessors." As a result, the code quality achieved by commercial compilers for DSPs_ is still far from satisfactory. In addition, current compiler technology does not support frequent changes of the target processor, which would be necessary for effective hardware-software codesign environments. In this book, new techniques for retargetable and optimizing compilers for DSPs are presented and put into context with related work. The whole compilation process is covered, including target processor capture, intermediate code generation, code selection, register allocation, scheduling and optimizations for parallelism. This research monograph is a revised version of my doctoral thesis, which has been submitted to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dortmund (Germany) in November I would like to thank my advisor Prof. Dr. Peter Marwedel and my co-referee Prof. Dr. Ernst-Erich Doberkat for their efforts and valuable comments. Furthermore, I would like to thank IX

9 X RETARGETABLE CODE GENERATION FOR DSPs my colleagues at the "LS XII" division of the Computer Science department at the University of Dortmund. Particular support has been provided by Steven Bashford, Birger Landwehr, Wolfgang Schenk, and Ingolf Markhof. Dr. Detlef Sieling gave important hints concerning binary decision diagrams. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of Dr. Jef van Meerbergen (Philips Research Labs, Eindhoven, The Netherlands) and Vojin Zivojnovic (Technical University of Aachen, Germany), who contributed material for application studies. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for providing some technical and so much mental support and encouragement. I dedicate this book to my ladies Bettina, Helen, and Paulina. Dortmund, April 1997 Rainer Leupers