Java Flowpaths: Efficiently Generating Circuits for Embedded Systems from Java

Abstract

The performance of software executed on a microprocessor is adversely affected by the basic fetchexecute cycle. A further performance penalty results from the load-execute-store paradigm associated with the use of local variables in most high-level languages. This paper describes creating Java flowpaths, a general method of generating hardware directly from Java bytecodes that support basic operations, class instantiation, events, and multi-threaded applications. Performance increases occur because flowpaths created from Java programs require zero clock cycles for load, stack manipulation, and class instantiation operations. In addition, multithreaded flowpaths do not suffer from traditional processor bottlenecks such as context switching, stack manipulation and the traditional load, execute and store operation. Results show that these improvements yield several orders of magnitude improvement in terms of speed for both sequential and multithreaded programs