The effects of pipelining feedback loops in high speed DSP systems

Many of today´s electronic design automation (EDA) tools include intellectual property (IP) cores that are fully pipelined to increase data throughput. Using these cores to implement data paths that do not involve feedback can result in fast, efficient designs. However, if they are used within a feedback loop, this is not always the case. The paper examines the effects that using pipelined cores in feedback loops can have on a design. By considering two designs that implement a Givens rotation using feedback, which is used in QR decomposition (Haykin, S., 1990), it is shown that, even though a pipelined design can be clocked faster, its data throughput is less than a non-pipelined design. Also, the non-pipelined design is shown to be smaller and consumes less power. Finally, a suggestion for a more efficient use of pipelining in feedback loops is presented, based on channel interleaving (Parhi, K.K., 1999).