A novel reconfigurable operator based IC design methodology for multimedia processing

Currently the DSP applications such as multimedia processing raise the demands to IC designers for more flexibility, higher performance and shorter time-to-market. To solve these problems, this paper proposed a novel reconfigurable operator based IC design methodology for multimedia applications. Four kinds of reconfigurable operators and their logic meanings are introduced in this paper as well as the design flow. An archetypal reconfigurable circuit with 4*4 reconfigurable computing operator, reALU, is implemented in our research using SMIC 0.18 um CMOS, achieving the performance 2.4 GOPS at 150 Mhz at 1.62 v. Several algorithms such as SAD and DCT are mapped into the array processor, which show the better performance than the traditional digital signal processors.