A C-Based Variable Length and Vector Pipeline Architecture Design Methodology and Its Application

The size and performance of a System LSI depend heavily on the architecture which is chosen. As a result, the architecture design phase is one of the most important steps in the System LSI development process and is critical to the commercial success of a device. In this paper, we propose a C-based variable length and vector pipeline (VVP) architecture design methodology and apply it to the design of the output probability computation circuit for a speech recognition system. VVP processing accelerated by loop optimization, memory access methods, and application-specific circuit design was implemented to calculate the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) output probability at high speed and its performance is evaluated. It is shown that designers can explore a wide range of design choices and generate complex circuits in a short time by using a C-based pipeline architecture design method.