Silicon-Based Accelerator Revs Up Wireless Internet Apps

Targeting cell phones, PDAs and other wireless products designed to run Internet applications, the HotShot silicon-based accelerator reportedly can increase the speed at which the apps are executed by up to 25X compared to existing methods while also dramatically reducing power dissipation. HotShot can be used to accelerate: open-standard software such as Java, WAP, i-mode and XML; media processing performance for standards such as MPEG, JPEG and PNG files; and on-the-fly instruction set translation.
The architecture is designed to integrate one or more of the silicon-based accelerators as standard peripherals on popular µPs. For SOCs, the HotShot acceleration engine can be directly connected to the internal system bus, with initial implementations of the technology to include support for an AMBA bus interface and a generic memory bus interface.
First implementation of HotShot's portable, modular and extensible architecture is as a synthesizable accelerator core designed to work with ARM processors and Java. No modifications to the processors, applications, or operating systems employed by the wireless product are required.