Accelerating Processors with Simple Touches

A. Gürhanli Bursa Orhangazi University, Department of Computer Engineering, Bursa, Turkey

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Computer architects are familiar with complex processor designs. A tiny performance improvement may need involvement of numerous experts and months of tedious work. But sometimes without adding lots of extra hardware or inventing complex hardware algorithms, it is still possible to accelerate a design substantially by doing minor alterations in the data path. This paper presents how an ARM compatible processor's clock rate became 1.285 times faster by changing IO pads, employing multiplexers, and improving the ALU design. The processor has been implemented in Verilog HDL and the performance improvements have been verified by simulation using the Design Compiler tool of Synopsys.

DOI: 10.12693/APhysPolA.130.252 PACS numbers: 07.05.Bx, 89.20.Ff