Design Philosophy of a Data-Driven Processor: Q-p

概要

論文の詳細を見る
A bread-board prototype of a VLSI-oriented data-driven Processor or Q-P (Queue-prototype), which can handle history-sensitive processes under consistency constraints, has been developed jointly by Osaka University and four VLSI manufacturers: Sharp Corporation, Matsushita Electric, Sanyo Electric and Mitsubishi Electric. Since the Q-p is specifically designed to be a one-chip functional element that is easily programmable to form various dedicated processing functions, particular design considerations were taken to realize high flow-rate data-stream processing capabilities. This paper first introduces major objectives of the Q-p development project and then presents the Q-p's basic language structure to demonstrate advantages of diagrammatical representation of programs. After that, this paper reports an execution control based on the data-driven scheme incorporating history-sensitivity that gives rise to a unique "flow-thru processing" concept in which all processing, data-transfer and storage functions are carried out highly-parallel by a packetized data-flow through the elastic pipeline processing stages with completely distributed controls. This paper also reports the hardware structure of the emulated Q-p which allows us to fully utilize the available devices on a VLSI chip by means of a self-timed elastic pipeline scheme.
一般社団法人情報処理学会の論文
1988-03-10