Programmable Arithmetic Devices for High Speed Digital Signal Processing

The high throughput computation requirements of real-time digital signal processing (dsp) systems usually dictate hardware intensive solutions. Often attendant to hardware approaches are problems of high development costs, slow turnaround, susceptibility to errors, and difficulty in testing and debugging, all of which tend to inhibit the rapid implementation of such systems. Research is underway into the synthesis of application specific hardware to aid the system designer by automatically generating hardware that is "correct by construction". The creation of configurable, pre-fabricated hardware that has been designed for high speed computations forms part of this research and is the main topic of this thesis. This work contains a survey of some typical real-time dsp algorithms drawn from video and speech processing and summarizes the particular computation challenges posed by this class of algorithms. Currently available hardware choices and their trade-offs and limitations are discu..