Register Spilling for Specific Application Domains in Application Specific Instruction-set Processors

An Application Specific Instruction set Processor (ASIP) is an important component in designing embedded systems. One of the problems in designing an instruction set for such processors is determining the number of registers is needed in the processor that will optimize the computational time and the cost. The performance of a processor may fall short due to register spilling, which is caused by the lack of available registers in a processor. In the design perspective, it will result in processors with great performance and low power consumption if we can avoid register spilling by deciding a value for the number of registers needed in an ASIP. However, as of now, it has not clearly been recognized how the number of registers changes with different application domains. In this paper, we evaluated whether different application domains have any significant effect on register spilling and therefore the performance of a processor so that we could use different number of registers when building ASIPs for different application domains rather than using a constant set of registers. Such utilization of registers will result in processors with high performance, low cost and low power consumption. Keywords—register spilling; application specific processors