High-throughput CORDIC coprocessor for signal and display processing

A GaAs application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) has been designed to provide 40 million nonlinear operations (trigonometric functions, divisions, and multiplications) in a configuration that is compatible with many sensor preprocessing and display processing applications. The ASIC is based on the Coordinate Rotation by Digital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm and will be fabricated with Honeywell´s low-power, high-speed complementary heterostructure field-effect transistor (C-HFET) GaAs process. The CORDIC chip can be used for radar electrooptic sensor preprocessing and display coordinate transformation applications. It is shown how one CORDIC ASIC could replace several digital signal processors in, e.g., future synthetic vision systems. The C-HFET GaAs CORDIC has four times higher throughput than CMOS implementations of the same algorithm. Implementation of the same functions with off-the-shelf silicon ASICs would require four times higher power and yield 16 times lower throughput