Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.2498/cit.2004.01.01
VHDL Design of a Scalable VLSI Sorting Device Based on Pipelined Computation
Enzo Mumolo
Abstract
This paper describes the VHDL design of a sorting algorithm, aiming at defining an elementary sorting unit as a building block of VLSI devices which require a huge number of sorting units. As such, care was taken to reach a reasonable low value of the area-time parameter. A sorting VLSI device, in fact, can be built as a cascade of elementary sorting units which process the input stream in a pipeline fashion: as the processing goes on, a wave of sorted numbers propagates towards the output ports. The paper describes the design starting from an initial theoretical analysis of the algorithm's complexity to a VHDL behavioural analysis of the proposed architecture to a structural synthesis of a sorting block based on the Alliance tools to, finally, a silicon synthesis which was worked out again using Alliance. Two points in the proposed design are particularly noteworthy. First, the sorting architecture is suitable for treating a continuous stream of input data rather than a block of data as in many other designs. Secondly, the proposed design reaches a reasonable compromise between area and time, as it yields an A T product which compares favourably with the theoretical lower bound.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
44729
URI
Publication date:
30.3.2004.
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