LAGER is an integrated computer-aided design (CAD) system for algorithm-specific h c g r a c d circuit(1C) design, targeted at applications such as speech processing, image processing, telecommunications, and robot control. LAGER provides user interfaces at behavioral, structural, and physical levels and allows easy integration of new CAD tools. LAGER consists of a behavioral mapper and a silicon assembler. The behavioral mapper maps the behavior onto a parameterized structure to produce microcode and parameter values. The silicon assembler then translates the filled-out structural description into a physical layout and with the aid of simulation tools, the user can fine tune the data path by iterating this process. The silicon assembler can also be used without the behavioral mapper for high sample rate applications. A number of algorithm-specific IC's designed with LAGER have been fabricated and tested, and as examples, a robot arm controller chip and a real-time image segmentation chip will be described.
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The FieldThe technical field of Signal Processing encompasses all forms of sampled-data manipulation where the data (or signal) has a physical origin, or destination. In the context of ISSCC, signal processing refers to solid-state circuits designed to process samples that may be in digital or analog format. Physical origins or destinations include mechanical (audio) and electromagnetic waves (either in conductors or in free space), such as for telephony, radio, imaging, or optical transmission.The restriction to sampled data is an important one, and distinguishes signal processing from purely continous-time processing, as is performed by traditional analog circuits. While discrete time (or space) is of the essence, what characterizes signal processing at ISSCC is also the continuous real-time nature of the processing, as opposed to the matched process of data collection followed by off-line processing. The Early YearsDefinitions aside, signal processing has a long and distinguished history at the Conference. However, the pace of development has definitely quickened in the last 25 years. An early example of sampled-data (analog) processing was presented by Franks in 1960 [1], in a paper describing a sampled-data bandpass filtering process based on junction-diode switching.Development of signal-processing circuits began to accelerate in the 1970s. Significant milestones in analog and digital sampled-data-processing are exemplified by the papers on CCD circuits [2], and the first integrated digital filter [3]. The sampledanalog CCD technique was used in what was perhaps the first dedicated implementation of the Discrete Fourier Transform [4]. The most significant advantage of CCD and switched-capacitor [5] circuits was that no analog-todigital conversion was needed for the signals. However, the increased effort required to obtain a robust design of ever-morecomplex analog sampled-data circuits resulted in a market opportunity for digital solutions.Simultaneous progress in the area of A/D and D/A data-conversion circuits permitted the use of highly-integrated digital signal-processing functions in an economical manner. In particular, the early 1980s saw the first examples of programmable DSP circuits [6,7,8]. The VLSI era also introduced the first examples of complex hard-wired or dedicated DSP functions [9] on a chip. With increasingly-complex numerical algorithms, ease of programming was provided by DSPs that used floating-point rather than fixed-point instruction sets [10]. The More-Recent EraSince the mid 1980s, both analog and digital signal processing were strongly affected by a change from NMOS and bipolar/BiMOS to CMOS technology. This allowed a succession of new application areas, such as speech synthesis and coding/decoding [11,12,13], speech recognition [14], and image processing [15,16,17]. At the same time, although more slowly, "digital" CMOS was being adopted for the fabrication of analog signal-processing functions.By exploiting the progress of CMOS developed for microprocessors, digital signal proce...
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