A Design And Extension Of Digital Signal Processor Core

The endless development of integrated circuits design and manufacture technology has enabled a wide application of the digital signal processors (DSP) in communication, computer, control and other fields. Meanwhile, digital signal processing algorithms are becoming more and more complicated that it is quite hard to enhance the performance of the DSP on a certain occasions only through software optimization. In addition, the fierce competition has placed a higher requirement to the flexibility and development time of a DSP than before.This paper has presented the structure, implementation and functional extension of a digital signal processor core. Extension on the data path and instruction set can be adopted to this DSP with high flexibility. According to the top down design flow, the structure of the basic DSP core is displayed, followed by the structure of the address generation unit, the two-pass decode finite state machine and the pipeline control unit. The solution to hazards has shown the flexibility of the core.On the basis of the basic core, an extended DSP core is implemented, which has used a fast Fourier transform (FFT) as the extended unit. Mass functional verifications have proved the feasibility, optimization effects, high acceleration and parallel level of the extended DSP core.The exploration of the design rules of the DSP core is helpful and has paved the way to a more powerful and flexible DSP in the future.