Signal Processing Studies Program VLSI Designs for Unary Functions

摘要

Use of engineering workstations greatly facilitates the design of special purpose (application specific) electronic circuits of VLSI level complexity. With a view toward the likely need for special purpose chips for future high performance signal processing applications, an examination into the nature of the enhancement in efficiency provided by a competitive workstation was conducted using the Chipmaster software available on a Daisy workstation. Layout of an 'on-line' arithmetic circuit was performed. The circuit implements an algorithm for computing 1/X where X is the binary input to the circuit. 'On-line' refers to arithmetic methods in which the results of computations are obtained in the form of a sequence of digits with the most significant digit obtained first and succeeding digits obtained in turn. 'On-line' algorithms have been developed by Ercegovac, the logic level circuit used in the study was generated by Henderson, and the effort was part of a broader study of systolic array signal processing systems by Symanski.