A parallel, high speed circular queue structure

A 4×4 parallel circular queue structure in which data can be stored and deleted simultaneously is presented. This design eliminates the latency problem, which is the time for the data to propagate from input to output ports in a serial queue. The insertions and deletions are accomplished by two pointers, front and rear, which are interfaced to two independent bus structures. This allows the data to be inserted into a location where the rear pointer is pointing to, if the queue is not full and the rear pointer is incremented to point to the next available space. The data are deleted from a location where the front pointer is pointing to if the queue is not empty and the front pointer is incremented to point to the next data to be deleted. An up/down counter is used to control the activity of the queue and to set/reset full and empty flags. The queue is circular in the sense that there are no specific input and output ports from which data should be inserted and deleted, respectively. The design has the characteristics of simplicity and modularity, which makes it attractive for VLSI implementation