Event driven design methodology for hardware DSP design

In English Today's hardware DSP designs, with a composition of hardware in datapath/controller pairs, are becoming increasingly complex to design. It will be argued that hardware DSP architectures can be significantly simplified by distributing the control to the individual pipeline stages and by switching to an event based design methodology. This paper will describe a design methodology for event based DSP hardware designs that utilizes a peer-to-peer symmetric handshaking protocol. It will be shown that due to the symmetric handshaking protocol a rich design space can be obtained by a small number of handshaking circuits. This has been verified by the design of a complete UMTS turbo decoder according to the outlined methodology. The advantages of the symmetric handshaking protocol as compared to asymmetric protocols (master-slave) is a reduction in the critical wire delay by up to 50% and a larger design space, because the symmetric protocol is less restrictive