VLSI DESIGN METHODOLOGIES FOR DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

ARCHITECTURES

THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES IN ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

VLSI, COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

Consulting Editor Jonathan Allen

Other books in the series:

CONNECTIONIST SPEECH RECOGNITION: A Hybrid Appoach, H. Bourlard, N. Morgan ISBN: 0-7923-9396-1

BiCMOS TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATIONS, SECOND EDITION, A.R. Alvarez ISBN: 0-7923-9384-8

TECHNOLOGY CAD-COMPUTER SIMULATION OF IC PROCESSES AND DEVICES, R. Dutton, Z. Yu

ISBN: 0-7923-9379 VHDL '92, THE NEW FEATURES OF THE VHDL HARDWARE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE,1. Berge, A. Fonkoua, S. Maginot, J. Rouillard

ISBN: 0-7923-9356-2 APPLICATION DRIVEN SYNTHESIS, F. Catthoor, L. Svenson

ISBN :0-7923-9355-4 ALGORITHMS FOR SYNTHESIS AND TESTING OFASYNCHRONOUS CIRCUITS, L. Lavagno, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

ISBN: 0-7923-9364-3 HOT-CARRIER RELIABILITY OF MOS VLSI CIRCUITS, Y. Leblebici, S. Kang

ISBN: 0-7923-9352-X MOTION ANALYSIS AND IMAGE SEQUENCE PROCESSING, M. I. Sezan, R. Lagendijk

ISBN: 0-7923-9329-5 HIGH-LEVEL SYNTHESIS FOR REAL-TIME DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING: The Cathedral-II Silicon Compiler, 1. Vanhoof, K. van Rompaey, I. Bolsens, G. Gossens, H. DeMan

ISBN: 0-7923-9313-9 SIGMA DELTA MODULATORS: Nonlinear Decoding Algorithms and Stability Analysis, S. Hein, A. Zakhor

ISBN: 0-7923-9309-0 LOGIC SYNTHESIS AND OPTIMIZATION, T. Sasao

ISBN: 0-7923-9308-2 ACOUSTICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ROBUSTNESS IN AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION, A. Acero

ISBN: 0-7923-9284-1 DESIGN AUTOMATION FOR TIMING-DRIVEN LAYOUT SYNTHESIS, S. S. Sapatnekar, S. Kang

ISBN: 0-7923-9281-7 DIGITAL BiCMOS INTEGRATED CIRCUIT DESIGN, S. H. K. Embadi, A. Bellaouar, M. I. Elmasry

ISBN: 0-7923-9276-0 WAVELET THEORY AND ITS APPLICATIONS, R. K. Young

ISBN: 0-7923-9271-X VHDL FOR SIMULATION, SYNTHESIS AND FORMAL PROOFS OF HARDWARE, 1. Mermet

ISBN: 0-7923-9253-1 ELECTRONIC CAD FRAMEWORKS, T. J. Barnes, D. Harrison, A. R. Newton, R. L. Spickelmier

ISBN: 0-7923-9252-3 ANATOMY OF A SILICON COMPILER, R. W. Brodersen

ISBN: 0-7923-9249-3

VLSI DESIGN METHODOLOGIES FOR DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

ARCHITECTURES

edited by

Magdy A. Bayoumi The University of Southwestern Louisiana

.... "

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

VLSI design methodologies for digital signal processing architectures /edited by Magdy A. Bayoumi

p. cm. -- (The Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science ; 257)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4613-6192-3 ISBN 978-1-4615-2762-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-2762-6 1. Application specific integrated circuits--Design and

construction--Data processing. 2. Computer architecture. 3. Silicon compilers. 4. Signal processing--Digital techniques. L Bayoumi, Magdy A. II. Series: Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science ; SECS 257 TK7874.6.V57 1994 621.382 '2--dc20 93-39842

CIP

Copyright © 1994 by Springer Science+Business Media New York Origina11y published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1994

AlI rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo­copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Printed on acid-free paper.

To Acadiana

With smiling eyes, you opened your arms for me I hugged you, I kissed you, and we are dancing since.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD ix

PREFACE xiii

1. Sphinx: A High Level Synthesis System for ASIC Design

N. Ramakrishna and M. A. Bayoumi 1

2. Synthesizing Optimal Application-Specific DSP Architectures

C. H. Gebotys 43

3. Synthesis of Multiple Bus Architectures for DSP Applications

B. S. Haroun and M. I. Elmasry 93

4. Exploring the Algorithmic Design Space Using High Level Synthesis

M. Potkonjak and J. Rabaey 131

5. The MARS High-Level DSP Synthesis System

C. -Y. Wang and K. K. Parhi 169

6. High Performance Architecture Synthesis System

P. Duncan, S. Swamy, S. Sprouse, D. Potasz and R. Jain 207

7. Modeling Data Flow and Control Flow for DSP System Synthesis

M. F. X. B. Swaaij, F. H. M. Franssen, F. V. M. Catthoor and H. J. DeMan 219

8. Automatic Synthesis of Vision Automata B. Zavidovique, C. Fortunel, G. Quenot,

A. Sajir, J. Serot and F. Verdier 261

viii

9. Architectures and Building Blocks for Data

10.

INDEX

Stream DSP Processors G. A. lullien

A General Purpose Xputer Architecture Derived from DSP and Image Processing

A. Ast, R. W. Hartenstein, H. Reinig, K. Schmidt and M. Weber

319

365

395

FOREWORD

Designing VLSI systems represents a challenging task. It is a transfonnation among different specifications corresponding to different levels of design: abstraction, behavioral, stntctural and physical. The behavioral level describes the functionality of the design. It consists of two components; static and dynamic. The static component describes operations, whereas the dynamic component describes sequencing and timing. The structural level contains infonnation about components, control and connectivity. The physical level describes the constraints that should be imposed on the floor plan, the placement of components, and the geometry of the design. Constraints of area, speed and power are also applied at this level. To implement such multilevel transfonnation, a design methodology should be devised, taking into consideration the constraints, limitations and properties of each level. The mapping process between any of these domains is non-isomorphic. A single behavioral component may be transfonned into more than one structural component.

Design methodologies are the most recent evolution in the design automation era, which started off with the introduction and subsequent usage of module generation especially for regular structures such as PLA's and memories. A design methodology should offer an integrated design system rather than a set of separate unrelated routines and tools. A general outline of a desired integrated design system is as follows:

* Decide on a certain unified framework for all design levels.

* Derive a design method based on this framework.

* Create a design environment to implement this design method.

An overview of an integrated design methodology is presented in Chapter 1; the rest of the book discusses the following emerging issues:

System Integration: Integrating all the CAD tools at different lev­els is economically significant. Decisions made during early stages of high level synthesis have great effect on the final VLSI design implemen­tation. A unifonn data structure is needed for such integration among various levels (Chapter 1). Global optimization can be achieved with

x

such integrated systems (Chapter 8). A synthesis manager can be used for coordination and integration (Chapter 4). Several integrated CAD systems have been presented in this book; Sphinx (Chapter 1), HYPER (Chapter 4), MARS (Chapter 5), Hi_Pass (Chapter 6).

Optimization: Most of the subtasks of high-level synthesis are NP-hard. Optimization plays an important role in implementing such systems. Several approaches can be followed such as Heuristic-based algorithms, Graph-theoretical algorithms, and Integer programming. The latter proved to be the most efficient when solving several sub-tasks, simultaneously (Chapter 2). Identifying the intensive optimization tasks is a key parameter to reduce the computational complexity of a design system.

Algorithm Transformation: Algoritlnn transformation is the first phase in architecture synthesis. Optimizing these types of transforma­tions- retiming pipelining, basic block transformation, control structure transformation, and suboperational level transformation, will shift the emphasis from the traditional level synthesis tasks (such as scheduling, assignment, allocation and module selection) (Chapters 4, 5 & 6).

Impact of Applications: Application requirements playa significant role in deciding the target architecture styles and modules. The main factors are the sampling speed, and the level of required numerical and aritlnnetic computations (Chapters 4, 6-10). The tasks performed by various CAD tools are highly dependent on the target architectures, their hardware components, and interconnections (Chapter 3). Parallelism is a natural architectural style for high speed sampling rates. It can be realized on the system level by using multiple buses and functional units (Chapter 3), or on the aritlnnetic level by using multiple operators concurrently (Chapter 6), or by employing non-traditional aritlnnetic systems (Chapter 9).

Memory Management: DSP and image processing systems involve a lot of data storage and intermediate data manipulation. Such data pro­cessing in real-time presents not only computational problems, but also storage problems. Several solutions are discussed in different chapters

xi

such as: Designing high level memory manager (Chapter 7), Automated assignment of variables to multiple memories (Chapter 3), and Inter­facing the developed designed system to an existing data base structure and management; e.g: ocr tool (Chapter 6) and CADENCE Edge tool (Chapter 1).

Algorithm Prototyping: As DSP applications get more complicated and involve various components viz., smart sensors, prototyping became an economic necessity. Prototyping is also an efficient vehicle for soft­ware development. Two approaches can be followed: first, using a gen­eral machine with specific capability for software development (Chapter 10); and, second, using hardware modules for functional representation of an algorithm, i.e. hardware emulation (Chapter 8).

PREFACE

In recent years, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) architectures have gained considerable significance, because of their wide application do­mains, which range from medium throughput speech, audio and telecom­munication systems at the lower end of the spectrum, to image, video and radar processing at the high frequency end. Moreover, state-of-the­art systems for real-time mass communication, such as robotics, machine vision, and satellite systems, represent fast growing application areas. For such complex systems, especially for those designed for consumer electronics market, features such as throughput, area, power consumption and packaging tend to be of utmost importance. Design cycle time, from algorithms to system, has to be reduced, from a few years to weeks, in or­der to respond to the changing market. These objectives can be achieved by implementing DSP systems in an Application Specific Integrated Cir­cuits (ASICs) paradigm using a comprehensive design methodology.

A design methodology should offer an integrated design system rather than a set of separate unrelated routines and tools. It is focussed around high level synthesis that transform a high level specification (behavioral or functional) into an intermediate implementation. Synthesis technologies have become very popular; due to mainly these reasons, the need to get a correctly working system the first time, the ability to experiment with several alternatives of the design, and the economic factors (such as time to market etc.). In addition, synthesis systems allow designers with limited knowledge, of low level implementation details, to analyze and trade-off between alternative implementations without actually implementing the target architectures.

Design methodologies and environments for DSP architectures and applications are the focus of this book. The emphasis is centered around the emerging issues in this area, which are: system integration, optimization, algorithm transformation, impact of applications, memory management and algorithm prototyping.

xiv

The intent of this book is to be infonnative and to stimulate the reader to get a head start, gain knowledge and participate in the fast evolving field of Application Specific Design Methodology for DSP Architectures. The book can be used as a textbook for research courses in Application Specific Design, VLSI Design Methods, and Silicon Compilers. It can also be used as supplementary text for graduate and senior undergraduate courses in DSP architectures, design, and applications. It can also serve as a material for tutorials and short courses in these topics.

The idea of this book was motivated by a pre-symposium workshop at IS CAS '92, San Diego. The speakers in this workshop were Catherine H. Gebotys, Baher Haroun, Rajeev Jain and myself. The workshop was sponsored by the VLSI Systems and Applications (VSA) Technical committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems society. I extend my thanks to the speakers at the workshop for supporting the idea of this book, starting from its conception in San Diego. Special thanks to the authors who patiently spent considerable time and effort to have their research work reported in this book. The environment at the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS) has been dynamic, inspiring and supportive for such a project. My sincere thanks and appreciation to my close friends N.A. Ramakrishna and Aakash Tyagi. They have been my students and colleagues for several years; working with them has been a very enjoyable experience. Having Cathy Pomier in CACS is a source of smiles in tense times. She is the person to go to when deadlines are overwhelming. My sincere thanks to Kluwer Academic Publishers for their continuing support, to Bob Holland, the editor and his assistant Rose Luongo for their patience. They have provided me with a friendly communication channel.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my lovely wife's support and patience. She is still looking forward to my future money-maker book. My interesting kids, Aiman, Walid and Amanda, are always asking me when I will write a #1 Best Seller, so their friends can see it in Wal-Mart and other bookstores in the Acadiana mall.

Magdy A. Bayoumi.