A variable-radix digit-serial design methodology and its application to the discrete cosine transform

A variable-radix digit-serial design methodology and its application to the implementation of a systolic structure for computing the discrete cosine transform is presented. Based on the parameters supplied by a user, different fixed-point designs can be derived from a single floating-point description where tradeoffs among quantization effects, throughput, latency, and area can be addressed. The resulting hardware implementations have variables of different wordlengths and operators of different radices. This design methodology enables efficient exploration of a complex design space to determine the most suitable implementation for a particular application.