Compositional technique for synthesising multi-phase regular arrays

Abstract

We describe a high-level design method to synthesize multi-phase regular arrays. The method is based on deriving component designs using classical regular (or systolic) array synthesis techniques and composing these separately evolved component designs into a unified global design. Similarity transformations are applied to component designs in the composition stage in order to align data flow between the phases of the computations. Three transformations are considered: rotation, reflection and translation. The technique is aimed at the design of hardware components for high-throughput embedded systems applications and we demonstrate this by deriving a multi-phase regular array for the 2D DCT algorithm which is widely used in many video communications applications.