An increasing number of system designers are using ASIP's rather than ASIC's to implement their system solutions. Building ASIPs: The Mescal Methodology gives a simple but comprehensive methodology for the design of these application-specific instruction processors (ASIPs).

The key elements of this methodology are:

Judiciously using benchmarking

Inclusively identifying the architectural space

Efficiently describing and evaluating the ASIPs

Comprehensively exploring the design space

Successfully deploying the ASIP

This book includes demonstrations of applications of the methodologies using the Tipi research framework as well as state-of-the-art commercial toolsets from CoWare and Tensilica.