Introduction

In order to exploit VLSI for high performance, we need to understand the characteristics of the scaled VLSI technologies. For example, VLSI offers a greater potential for complexity than speed, favors replication of one function, and imposes a high cost in performance for non-localized communication. Design costs can be minimized by composing the system as a replication of simple processing elements. These considerations favor implementations which feature arrays of identical or easily parametrized processing elements (since, these are easily given a software procedural definition) with mostly localized interconnections (for reduced communication costs). This has led to an interest in systolic- and wavefront-array implementations [1, 2].