Design of a pipelined music synthesizer based on the wavetable method

This paper describes a design of a music synthesizer based on the wavetable method which synthesizes waveforms by sampling, looping, and filtering stored sound data of an instrument. When compared to conventional wavetable music synthesizers supporting 32 polyphony, the designed synthesizer, SWS-64, supports 64 polyphony by employing a 3-stage pipeline architecture. For the functional verification of the SWS-64, we simulated the sound of each instrument from MIDI messages using the SWS-64 model described in C. By applying the top-down design approach, the SWS-64 was synthesized from the RT-level model described in VHDL by Synopsys Design Analyzer and Compass. The post-layout simulation results show that the SWS-64 operates at a clock speed of 33.9 MHz under the worst conditions.