Automatic generation of application-specific systems based on a micro-programmed Java core

This paper describes a co-design based approach for automatic generation of application specific systems, suitable for FPGA-centric embedded applications. The approach augments a processor core with hardware accelerators extracted automatically from a high-level specification (Java) of the application, to obtain a custom system, optimised for the target application. We advocate herein the use of a microprogrammed core as the basis for system generation in order to hide the hardware access operations in the micro-code, while conserving the core data-path (and clock frequency). To prove the feasibility of our approach, we also present an implementation based on a modified version of the Java Optimized Processor soft core on a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA.