ST231
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The ST231 is the most successful member of the ST200 family of embedded VLIW cores, jointly designed by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and STMicroelectronics under the name "Lx".
The ST200 is a scalable and customizable family of VLIW embedded cores. The ST210, ST220, ST231 are implementations based on the same 4-issue VLIW microarchitecture, which allows issuing and executing four operations every cycle. The instruction set is a clean RISC, with support for VLIW execution, partial predication, silent memory speculation. The ST231 architecture contains four integer units, 2 multipliers, 1 branch unit, and 1 load/store unit, which can be mixed and match in a VLIW instruction. It also includes a general purpose register bank of 64x32-bit registers and a branch register bank (for branch conditions and partial predication support) of 8x1-bit registers. The ST200 architecture can be (optionally) scaled to multiple VLIW clusters, for increased ILP.
The addition of the MMU enables the ST231 to run Linux.
[edit] External links
- "Embedded Computing: A VLIW approach to Architecture, Compilers and Tools" book
- Linux distributions and documentation
- STMicro Press Release on EEMBC benchmark results
- Paper introducing the ST200 [Paolo Faraboschi, Geoffrey Brown, Joseph A. Fisher, Giuseppe Desoli and Fred Homewood, "Lx: A technology platform for customizable VLIW embedded processing", Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), June 2000)]
- EETimes article on the HP-STM project
