Techniques for the evolution of pipelined linear transforms

Linear transforms are used in an enormous variety of signal processing tasks. When implemented in hardware, multiplierless transforms have advantages in terms of power, silicon area and longest-path delay. The design space for multiplierless transforms can be large and highly multimodal, so powerful search techniques such as evolutionary algorithms are necessary. This paper investigates two ways in which the performance of such an evolutionary hardware design system might be improved. The first technique involves a reduction in the search space, while the second technique is a novel graph crossover operator.