The development of a fault tolerant ULSI signal processor

A fault-tolerant ultra large-scale integration (ULSI) signal processor which handles 32-bit floating-point data conforming to IEEE standard 754 and includes sufficient on-chip random access memory to perform a 1024-point fast Fourier transform (FFT) without reference to external memory is discussed. The chip is designed to run at 32 MHz using completely standard 1.5-μm bulk CMOS technology, with an estimated chip size of 4 cm². In FFT mode, one FFT butterfly operation can be started every clock cycle such that a complete 1024-point complex FFT is completed in 160-μs (typ). The aim is to raise the yield of the device to the point where a multiprocessor system can be realized from a small array of these processors