Question

Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP)

Answer 1

Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP)

• It is designed for specific application.
  
• ASIP have good flexibility with good performance.
  
• It have low cost and low power consumption.
  
• So efficiency is high.
  
• Embedded microcontrollers, network processor and digital signal processor are the types of Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP).
  
• It have higher computational speed.
  
• And higher datapath utilization due to programmability.
  

Answer 2

An application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) can serve as a compromise between the general purpose processor and single-purpose processors.

An ASIP is a Programmable processor optimized for a particular class of applications having common characteristics such as embedded control, digital signal processing or telecommunications.

The designer of such a processor can optimize the data path for the application class, perhaps adding special functional units for common operations and eliminating other in frequently used units.

The features of ASIP are

1. Program memory

2. Optimized data path

3. Special functional units

Benefits:-

1. Flexibility

2. Good performance, power, and size

Drawbacks:-

Require large NRE cost to build the processor itself and to build a compiler, if these items don't already exist.

Types of ASIP:-

1. Microcontrollers

2. Digital signal processors

1. Microcontroller:-

A microcontroller is a microprocessor that has been optimized for embedded control applications. Such applications typically monitor and set numerous single bit control signals but do not perform a large amount of data computations.

Thus microcontrollers tend to have simple data paths that Excel at bit level operations and at reading and writing external bits.

Microcontrollers are used in control applications like serial communication peripherals, timers, counters, pulse width modulator and analog-digital converters.

Merits:-

1. Single-chip

2. Small compact

3. Low cost

2. Digital signal processors DSP:-

A DSP is a microprocessor, designed to perform common operations on digital signals, which are the digital encoding of analog signals like video and audio

These operations carry out common Signal Processing tasks like signal filtering, transformation, or the combination.

Search operations are math intensive including operations like multiply and add or shift and add.

The support such operations, a DSP may have special purpose data path components such as multiply-accumulate unit, which can perform computation like T= T+M[i]*k using only one instruction.

DSP programs often manipulate large arrays of data. A DSP may also include special hardware to fetch sequential data memory locations in parallel with other operations to further speed execution.