Rapid design of discrete transform cores

A new modular approach for the rapid design of application specific transform cores is presented. This approach allows the creation of hardware description language generators for the automated design and VLSI synthesis of specific integrated circuits for a range of multi-media applications. Resulting transform cores are portable across many silicon foundries and their hierarchical nature means that they can also be easily migrated to FPGA and PLD implementations. Exemplar core designs have been produced for the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and are shown to compare very favorably in terms of area, performance and power consumption with DCT circuits developed using more conventional methods. However, design times are reduced considerably. Most significantly, no constraints are placed on the transform size and area/speed trade-offs can be rapidly analyzed. Discrete Sine Transform cores have also been developed.