Simon's Projects 1997
Hardware Oriented Projects:
Electronic ornaments
Dataflow DSP
Geomentric HDL
Self-timed processor simulator
Animated Strong ARM
Animated circuits
 

Dataflow DSP


Proposal

Digital signal processors (DSPs) are widely used in embedded applications. Often high performance is required which results in some fairly wacky architectures to maximise parallelism. These tend to be difficult to program efficiently and it is often difficult for a compiler to generate optimal code. Consequently, there is a bias away from increased parallelism so a few large and complex but fast arithmetic units are preferable even when many small but slower ALUs could yield better aggregate performance. This is to the detriment of chip size and, thus, cost.

Dataflow processors provide the synchronisation primitives necessary to support highly parallel computation. The synchronisation overhead is too large of most conventional integer applications but it appears work better for DSP applications where more complex fixed-point and floating-point calculations dominate. Also, since DSPs are typically processing streams of data, a data-driven programming paradigm seems appropriate.

This project involves design and register-level simulation of a Dataflow DSP in order to obtain performance measures.


Previous work

I've supervised similar projects on processor design but not this particular version.


Special resources

None.


Possible supervisors

I'm willing to supervise this project.