High Performance, Fine Grained, Application Specific, VLSI Architectures

Irwin The primary thrust of the research is the investigation of a more general purpose signal processing architecture which achieves the same level of performance as special-purpose signal processing architectures without an accompanying increase in granularity. Most attempts at trying to expand an architecture to accommodate a more general class of applications usually result in an increase in granularity. With the increase in granularity either the overall size of the processor increases or, to keep the overall physical size constant, fewer processing cells are utilized. In either case, the end result is a decrease in performance. This project attempts the development of more general purpose signal processing architectures which avoid this difficulty while maintaining the granularity, performance, and physical size of fine grain processors with the flexibility of more coarse grain processors.