The Design of High-Performance Circuits for Digital Signal Processing

In order to place the research done under this contract in perspective, we start by describing the view of integrated circuit design that motivates our work. Our goal is to provide CAD design tools that enable the production of high-performance chips quickly, correctly, and economically, with particular emphasis on digital signal processing. It is the high-performance aspect of the design that has been our particular emphasis. We consider performance to have two aspects. Aspects of performance associated with circuit style and technology are extremely important, since there is continuing improvement in integrated circuit technology, and also because of the constant invention of new circuit forms that provide for faster performance without excessive demands on power. An additional goal at the circuit and layout level is the minimization of area, since this leads to small circuits with minimum length interconnect. In additional to circuit-oriented performance, however, there is also another aspect of performance that we call architectural performance. By this factor, we refer to the parallelism that is contained in a variety of different algorithms. Parallelism can be exploited through the use of pipelining, multiprocessing, and a variety of other architectural schemes. Since the emphasis in this contract is on digital signal processing algorithms, architectural performance is particularly important, since many digital signal processing algorithms have a very large amount of inherent parallelism. In this contract, we have performed explicit studies which show the interaction between circuit technology and architectural parallelism. rh