MERGE SORTING APPARATUS WITH COMPARISON NODES CONNECTED IN TOURNAMENT TREE SHAPE

摘要

A merge sorting apparatus comprises a comparison tournamentcircuit including comparison nodes, and a comparison controlcircuit for supplying to the corresponding comparison nodesvalidity flag information concerning the input data to each of thecomparison nodes determined based on comparison results from thecomparison nodes. The comparison control circuit comprisescomparison result registers for retaining the comparison results,validity flag registers for retaining the validity flag information,and merge member registers for retaining information as to whetheror not the input data to each of the input registers correspondingto respective pathways should be the object of comparison in thefollowing data comparison processing. With this arrangement,contending readouts of record arrays from a memory can be reducedand the necessity to initialize each register is eliminated,thereby speeding merge sorting.