A quasi radix-16 VLSI processor

The design and development of a high-performance fixed point digital signal processor is presented. The LH9124 DSP is a 24-bit fixed point processor that can manipulate data at rates of up to 80 MHz. It can perform transform operations at a very high speed by embedding these algorithms in the architecture. The set of macro-level functions provided included complex and real FFTs, fast cosine and sine transforms, complex and real FIRs, and convolution operations. It incorporates a unique architecture that allows it to compute a 1k point FFT in 81 μs, by using quasi radix-16 (QR 16) butterfly operations. The device can be easily configured in parallel or cascaded multi-chip systems to further enhance performance. The chip has been designed in 0.8 μm CMOS double metal technology and uses approximately 400000 transistors