Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

We present a new technique for the high-level synthesis of scalable^1 MCM-based architectures implementing infinite-impulse response(IIR) filters. Our technique is based on the regular schedules, a class of parallel schedules for computing mth-order IIR filters. The simplicity of the regular schedules facilitates characterization of their inter-processor communications, which is generally difficult to express for parallel algorithms. The characterization of inter-processor communications of the regular schedules enables us to generate instruction-level behavior of the design that can be easily mapped onto MCM-based architectures. We illustrate this mapping of the regular schedules onto an MCM-based architecture by designing a special-purpose processor for the fifth-order elliptic wave filter. Our design yields a scalable performance measured in the filter's sample rate, which is not known to have been achieved by previously published designs. This work differs significantly from "traditional" high-level synthesis techniques in its emphasis on synthesizing scalable, high-performance multichip designs.