Customizable Micro Speeds Java Apps

April 15, 2002

There's more than one way to execute multiple instructions per clock cycle. Arc International is taking an interesting approach with its new Java accelerator hardware for the ArcTangent-A4 customizable microprocessor. This Java accelerator was...

William G. Wong

The Java accelerator translates Java bytecodes to native instructions, using the existing processor and register set to support Java applications. Multiple bytecodes in a clock cycle are executed when multiple Java bytecodes are mapped to a single ArcTangent in-struction.

This on-the-fly optimization takes advantage of new, Java-oriented in-structions plus register remapping for Java stack support. These optimizable bytecode sequences are common with typical applications, letting them run faster on the hardware-enhanced processor.

The Java implementation adds only 5 kgates to the small 40 kgates used by the ArcTangent-A4 core. Adding per-ipherals and processor functionality will increase the number of gates in the final product.

The Java support is available immediately. ArcTangent-A4 licensing is negotiated on a per project basis.

Arc International, www.arccores.com; (408) 437-3400.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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