A Bit-Parallel Block-Parallel Functional Memory Type Parallel Processor Architecture

Kazutoshi KOBAYASHI
Keikichi TAMARU
Hiroto YASUURA
Hidetoshi ONODERA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E76-C    No.7    pp.1151-1158
Publication Date: 1993/07/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on New Architecture LSIs)
Category: Memory-Based Parallel Processor Architectures
Keyword: 
parallel processor,  memory-based simple structure,  logical and arithmetic operations,  

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Summary: 
We propose a new architecture of Functional Memory type Parallel Processor (FMPP) architectures called bit-parallel block-parallel (BPBP) FMPP. Design details of a prototype BPBP FMPP chip are also shown. FMPP is a massively parallel processor architecture that has a memory-based simple two-dimensional regular array structure suitable for memory VLSI technology. Computation space increases as integration density of memory increases. Computation time does not depend on the number of processors. So far, a bit-serial word-parallel (BSWP) implementation based on a content addressable memory (CAM) is mainly investigated as one of promising architectures of FMPP. In a BSWP FMPP, each word of a CAM works as a processor, and the amount of hardware is minimized by abopting a bit-serial operation, thus maximizing integration scale. The BSWP FMPP, however, does not allow operations between two words, which restriction limits the applicability of the BSWP FMPP. On the other hand, the proposed BPBP FMPP is designed to execute logical and arithmetic operations on two words. These operations are performed simultaneously on every group of words called a block. BPBP FMPP hereby achieves a high performance while maintaining high integration density of the BSWP, and is suitable for various applications.