A general DSP processor at the cost of 23K gates and 1/2 a man-year design time

This paper describes the design and implementation of a 16-bit fixed point DSP processor. The processor is intended as a platform for hardware accelerators and allows additional computational units and assembler instructions to be added. The I/O facilities can also be customized to the needs of a specific application. Benchmarking has shown that the processor, without any hardware accelerators, has a performance comparable to single MAC commercial DSP processors. The architecture has been successfully synthesized in a 0.13 μm process, resulting in a net-list of about 23000 gates, and a clock frequency of 195 MHz, making the performance/gate count ratio very competitive. It is also small enough to integrate 100 heterogeneous processors on a chip for example for communication infrastructure applications. The complete design time, including architecture and instruction set planning, assembler, debugger, instruction set simulator, RTL code and complete verification was about half a person-year.