A versatile linear insertion sorter based on an FIFO scheme

A linear sorter based on a first-in first-out (FIFO) scheme is presented. It is capable of discarding the oldest stored datum and inserting the incoming datum while keeping the rest of the stored data sorted in a single clock cycle. This type of sorter can be used as a co-processor or as a module in specialized architectures that continuously require to process data for non-linear filters based on order statistics. This FIFO sorting process is described by four different parallel functions that exploit the natural hardware parallelism. The architecture is composed of identical processing elements; thus it can be easily adapted to any data lengths, according to the specific application needs. The use of compact identical processing elements results in a high performance yet small architecture. Some examples are presented in order to understand the functionality and initialization of the proposed sorter. The results of synthesizing the proposed architecture targeting a field programmable gate array (FPGA) are presented and compared against other reported hardware-based sorters. The scalability results for several sorted elements with different bits widths are also presented. & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.