EXAMPLE OF COMBINED ALGORITHM DEVELOPMENT AND ARCHITECTURE DESIGN

In many modern signal processing applications, in particular real-time and adaptive signal processing, it turns out that there is a strong r elationship between the algorithms (nested-loop type) that compute sol utions to problems and the architectures (parallel/pipeline like) onto which the algorithms can be or should be mapped. From this observatio n it is believed that, within this class of applications, development of algorithms and design of architectures could better be considered s imultaneously. The framework in which such algorithms and architecture s can best be expressed and designed is that of flow graphs which natu rally describe both computations and communications between computatio ns. In order to ensure a consistent design methodology, it is necessar y to have a generic model and well-defined methods with which such des igns can be formally undertaken. We introduce these ingredients in thi s paper by analyzing the prototype application of linear equations sol ving.