A Digit-Serial Silicon Compiler

Richard I. Hartley, Peter F. Corbett

Abstract: A new silicon compiler is described, called PARSIFAL (not an acronym). It constructs chips with a data flow architecture in which data is passed in a digit-wide pipeline from one computational element to the next. The size of a digit may be specified by the user to be any value between one and the full word size of the chip. A digit size of one gives bit-serial chips whereas a digit-size equal to the word-size gives fully parallel computation. It is shown that an intermediate value of digit-size usually gives the most efficient chips in terms of throughput per unit area.