Design of Heterogeneous Dual-Core Java Application Processor for Embedded Applications

• Main Authors: Su, Kuan-Nian, 蘇冠年
• Other Authors: Tsai, Chun-Jen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05233126505169592575

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 資訊科學與工程研究所 === 97 === Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is becoming the standard application platform for complex multimedia embedded systems today. In this thesis, we present the design of a dual-core Java application processor for embedded systems. The processor is composed of a generic RISC core and a double-issue Java core. The generic RISC core is responsible for running service routines to support Java tasks such as I/O requests, media accelerator logic invocations, floating point operations, etc. The double-issue Java core is in charge of execution of the Java applications and JRE. More importantly, the proposed system does not rely on any full-blown OS (such as Linux) running on the RISC. Only a thin kernel that maintains the execution of interrupt-driven Java service routines is necessary to support the JRE. A fast inter-processor communication mechanism based on the Java programming model is also proposed to reduce the overhead of invocation of service routines. Based on the implementation on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA device, the Java execution performance of the proposed design is as much as 8 times faster than that of Sun’s CVM and 4 times faster than the reference implementation of Google Android-Dalvik VM running on a RISC processor at the same clock rate.