SPECTRON: Streaming processor specific for adaptronic and biomeditronic applications

Abstract

This paper presents a streaming processor specifically designed for adaptronic and biomedical engineering applications. The main characteristics of the streaming processor are the flexibility to implement floating-point-based scientific computations commonly performed in the digital signal processing application. The floating-point operators are connected to dual-port memories through separated 3 operand-buses and 2 resultant-buses. Synthesized with 130-nm technology, the Spectron can be clocked at 480 MHz. The processor can perform 4 parallel streaming/pipeline floating-point operations using its FPMAC and CORDIC cores, resulting in a performance of about 4×485 = 1.94 GFlops (Giga Floating-point operation per second), which is suitable for high performance image processing in biomedical electronic engineering applications.