An integrated system for rapid prototyping of high performance algorithm specific data paths

Abstract

A system has been developed which targets the rapid prototyping of high performance data computation units which are typical to real-time digital signal processing applications. The hardware platform of the system is a family of multiprocessor integrated circuits. The prototype chip of this family contains 8 processors connected via a dynamically controlled crossbar switch. With a maximum clock rate of 25 MHz, it can support a computation rate of 200 MIPs and can sustain a data I/O bandwidth of 400 MByte/sec. An assembler and simulator provide low-level programmability of the hardware. A compiler which takes input described in the high-level data flow language Silage, and performs estimation, transformations, partitioning, assignment, and scheduling before generating assembly code, provides an automated software compilation path.<>