Building high performance signal processors cheaply and quickly

The authors put forward the argument that it is quite feasible to rapidly design and build high performance signal processors on a modest budget. To illustrate the point, they offer the Micro-Grain Array Processor (MGAP). The design methodology behind the MGAP is examined. Briefly, the low cost and fast implementation time result from: using off-the-shelf parts wherever possible, using programmable parts wherever possible, and using conservative design techniques wherever possible. For those parts of the system where more aggressive design techniques are required, comprehensive simulation is performed. The MGAP is a flexible, fine grained array processor which fits onto a single 9U × 400mm VME board. The current PGA implementation of the processor array (128 × 128 processors) will place nearly a teraop of computing performance upon a desktop. The flexibility of the architecture allows one to target numerous applications including: signal and image processing, graph problems, sorting and searching, matrix computations, problems of astronomy, and computational biology