Investigating hardware micro-instruction folding in a Java embedded processor
Author
Summary, in English
Bytecode folding is an effective technique for speeding up execution in Java virtual machines. This paper investigates a hardware implementation of the aforementioned technique on BlueJEP, a Java embedded processor. Since BlueJEP is a micro-programmed stack machine, we adopt a micro-instruction oriented approach, folding up to four microinstructions (corresponding to up to four bytecodes, on occasion). A variety of processor versions for different subsets of folding patterns are implemented, simulated and synthesized on a Xilinx FPGA. The measurements and results show that, although the number of execution cycles is reduced, the critical path increase leads to a lower performance. Taking into account the device area, we conclude that for our case, adding a second processor may be preferred over hardware folding. In general, we observe that folding efficiency may only be evaluated properly on a real implementation, rather than using theoretical estimates, due to the increased complexity of the hardware.
Department/s
Publishing year
2010
Language
English
Pages
102-108
Publication/Series
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Java Technologies for Real-Time and Embedded Systems
Document type
Conference paper
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Topic
- Computer Science
Keywords
- Java
- Embedded Systems
- BlueJEP
- Bytecode Folding
Status
Published
Research group
- ESDLAB
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978-1-4503-0122-0