Silicon-Based Accelerator

HotShot is an advanced silicon-based accelerator that increases the execution speed of applications running on battery operated embedded devices up to 25X. No modifications to applications, operating systems or processor cores are required to take advantage of the engine/accelerator performance and power improvements. In addition, low power consumption, small silicon size and a minimal memory footprint were key design goals. The initial implementation of this highly portable architecture is designed to work with ARM processors.

The accelerator enables development and implementation of a new class of wireless Internet applications on low-power hand-held devices. It accelerates critical software such as Java, WAP, i-mode and XML, and boosts media processing performance for standards such as MPEG, JPEG and PNG files. The technology can also be applied to "on-the-fly" instruction set translation.

The architecture uses a modular approach to integrating accelerators as a standard peripheral on popular microprocessors. One or more silicon-based accelerators may be integrated into the Acceleration Engine to form a complete wireless software acceleration platform.

The platform employs just-in-time (JIT) software compiler techniques, which are implemented in high-speed silicon to generate highly optimized streams of native host processor instructions. In addition to accelerating application performance, the technology also decreases the battery power required for host code execution up to 95 percent.

Chicory Systems, Inc., 12365 Riata Trace Parkway 2-150, Austin, TX 78727. Tel: 512-249-2330; Fax: 512-249-5457.