P. Åström and P. Nilsson (Sweden)
Pipelining, Event based design, Datapath, Symmetric pro tocol
Todays hardware DSP designs, with a composition of hard ware in datapath/controller pairs, are becoming increas ingly complex to design. It will be argued that hardware DSP architectures can be significantly simplified by dis tributing the control to the individual pipeline stages and by switching to an event based design methodology. This paper will describe a design methodology for event based DSP hardware designs, that utilizes a peertopeer sym metric handshaking protocol. It will be shown that due to the symmetric handshaking protocol a rich design space can be obtained by a small number of handshaking circuits. This has been verified by the design of a complete UMTS turbo decoder according to the outlined methodology. The advantages of the symmetric handshaking protocol as com pared to asymmetric protocols (master-slave) is a reduction in the critical wire delay by up to 50% and a larger design space, because the symmetric protocol is less restrictive.
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