A fully-parallel 1 Mb CAM LSI for real-time pixel-parallel image processing

For real-time image-processing applications, a highly parallel system that exploits parallelism is desirable. A content addressable memory (CAM) that performs parallel data processing with words as the basic unit is a promising component of a compact highly parallel image processing system because of its suitability for LSI implementation. Conventional CAM LSIs, however, do not have efficient transfer of data between words. This limits image-processing applications. Moreover, they do not have enough capacity. More chips are required for pixel-order parallelism. This 1 Mb CAM LSI has dedicated functions for image processing, including data transfer. It performs two-dimensional pixel-parallel or cellular automation processing. Since it has 16 k words or processing elements (PEs) which process 128/spl times/128 pixels, a board-sized fully pixel-parallel image-processing system can be implemented using several chips.