Digital signal processing capabilities of CUSP, a high performance bit-serial VLSI processor

The Cornell University Signal Processor (CUSP) is a high performance CMOS processor which has been custom designed in VLSI to efficiently compute digital signal processing algorithms based on the Cooley-Tukey Radix-4 Fast Fourier Transform. One CUSP chip can be used as a stand-alone peripheral in a microprocessor system, or CUSP units can be combined into arrays in order to process signals with sampling rates of several MHz. It can attain a high numerical accuracy while maintaining a throughput superior to most available systems. In this paper we discuss the signal processing capabilities of CUSP, its simple programmability, and I/O interface. We also present simulation results which quantify the signal-to-noise ratio advantages of the bit-serial architecture.