Speed enhancement of digital signal processing software via microprogramming a general purpose minicomputer

Summary form only given, as follows. Execution time of digital signal processing software can be substantially reduced using automatically generated code which incorporates precomputed, data independent, control and data access parameters. In this paper, further speed enhancement of such software via microprogramming of computational kernels is discussed and demonstrated. It is shown that, in additon to elimination of instruction fetch and decode overhead, and reduction of data acccess time via use of hih speed scratchpad registers, microprogramming may permit fundamental operations to be recoded to yield substantially reduced execution times. An example is given whereb Booth's multiplication algorithm is combined wit microcode to yield a fixed-point multiply/add time several times faster than an implementation using the machine-level multiply/add instructions. Moreover the systematic nature of the computational microcode allows it to be generated by programs using the technique described previously. Finally, program execution times approachin an order of magnitude less than that of conventional assembler language implementations are shown feasible by incorporation of all techniques discussed. [Full paper available only at conference.]