Object Oriented ARM7 Coprocessor Giuliano Donzellini, Stefano Nervi, Domenico Ponta, Sergio Rossi, Stefano Rovetta University of Genoa ABSTRACT This paper presents preliminary results on the design of an Object Coprocessor (OCP) cooperating with a RISC-architecture processor (ARM7, by Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.). This coprocessor implements in hardware some low-level processing and control steps required by the object-oriented model. The processor and the OCP constitute a processing architecture whose extended instruction set features "object" treatment capabilities. Some special coprocessor instruction codes ("Object Instructions") have been introduced. Concepts such as "Polymorphism" and "Virtual methods" are supported at the hardware level. Preliminary results using typical object-oriented sequences show a gain in speed over a pure software implementation, on the same RISC machine. The specific design presented here refers to a prototype implementation that is currently under development and supported by the European Union Esprit Project (7517 SUMIS). Proceedings of the 31st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'98), published by the IEEE Computer Society. Copyright (c) 1998 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved