This book is concerned with advances in serial-data computa­ tional architectures, and the CAD tools for their implementation in silicon. The bit-serial tradition at Edinburgh University (EU) stretches back some 6 years to the conception of the FIRST silicon compiler. FIRST owes much of its inspiration to Dick Lyon, then at Xerox P ARC, who proposed a 'structured-design' methodology for construction of signal processing systems from bit-serial building blocks. Based on an nMOS cell-library, FIRST automates much of Lyon's physical design process. More recently, we began to feel that FIRST should be able to exploit more modern technologies. Before this could be achieved, we were faced with a massive manual re-design task, i. e. the porting of FIRST cell-library to a new technology. As it was to avoid such tasks that FIRST was conceived in the first place, we decided to move the level of user-specification much nearer to the silicon level (while still hiding details of transistor circuit design, place and route etc. , from the user), and by so doing, enable the specification of more functionally powerful libraries in technology-free form. The results of this work are in evidence as advances in serial-data design techniques, and the SECOND silicon compiler, introduced later in this book. These achievements could not have been accomplished without help from various sources. We take this opportunity to thank Profs.

Inhalt

1: Introduction.- The case for serial-data techniques.- The case against serial-data techniques.- Historical overview of bit-serial techniques.- Final comments.- 2: The First Generation.- FIRST.- The FIRST primitive set.- Bit-serial systems design.- Case study.- FFT subsystem design.- Filterbank subsystem design.- System specifications.- Initial design issues and decisions.- Functional design - the soft model.- Physical design - the hard model.- Test strategy and confidence levels.- A critical appraisal of FIRST.- 3: Rudiments.- Issues of space and time.- Control.- Two's complement integer coding.- Fundamental building blocks - the atoms.- Numerical principles of serial-data additive operations.- Partitioning issues.- 4: Two's Complement Multiplication.- Derivation from bit-parallel architectures.- Scrutiny of two serial-data multipliers.- Word-level equivalent architectures.- Comparison of the S/P and Lyon multipliers.- Serial/parallel multiplier environments.- Other approaches.- 5: Area-Saving Techniques.- Overview of vector computation.- Symmetric-coded serial/parallel muiltiplier.- Serial/parallel inner-product computer.- Architectural case studies.- Architectural synthesis.- Distributed arithmetic in context.- Cascading DA modules.- Incremental computation of squares/sums of squares.- Final comments.- 6: Throughput Enhancement.- Twin-pipe.- Radix-4.- Multi-precision.- Interfacing between operational domains.- The automultiplier.- Final comments.- 7: The Second Generation.- Process-independence.- Overview of SECOND.- PRIMITIVE specification (design capture).- PRIMITIVE verification (behavioural simulation).- Semi-custom PRIMITIVE implementation.- Custom PRIMITIVE implementation.- Other approaches.- Final comments.- 8: Concluding Remarks.- References.- Appendix A - Complex Multiplier.- Appendix B - Logic Synthesis.