Design Customization – Microcontroller Instruction Set Extension

Instruction set extensions are utilized to optimize the microcontroller's basic instruction set for individual applications. This allows for efficient execution of certain operations directly on the hardware, eliminating the need for inefficient software emulations. Combining multiple computing steps into a single step can also significantly reduce the required processing cycles.
Instruction set extensions can help reduce energy consumption, increase computing power, or decrease required silicon area for microcontroller manufacturing. Other goals may include simpler programming or increased code density.

Instruction set extensions can be useful in various application areas:
 

• Cryptography: Instructions for calculating points on elliptic curves or hash values can be added to improve the execution of cryptographic applications such as encryption and decryption, making them faster and more energy-efficient.
• Signal processing: can additionally benefit from command set extensions. In audio or image processing, combining multiply-accumulate operations into one instruction can speed up signal processing by performing the operation in a single clock cycle.
• Mathematical calculations: Complex calculations such as vector or matrix operations, as they occur in machine learning or data analysis, can be parallelized by instruction set extensions.