Synthesis of DSP Algorithms from Infinite Precision Specifications

Abstract

Digital signal processing (DSP) technology is the core of many modern application areas. Computer vision, data compression, speech recognition and synthesis, digital audio and cameras, are a few of themany fields where DSP technology is essential.

Although Moore’s law continues to hold in the semiconductor industry, the computational demands of modern DSP algorithms outstrip the available computational power of modern microprocessors. This necessitates the use of custom hardware implementations for DSP algorithms. Design of these implementations is a time consuming and complex process. This chapter focuses on techniques that aim to partially automate this task.

The main thesis of this chapter is that domain-specific knowledge for DSP allows the specification of behaviour at infinite precision, adding an additional ‘axis’ of arithmetic accuracy to the typical design space of power consumption, area, and speed. We focus on two techniques, one general and one specific, for optimizing DSP designs.