A VLSI array processor for image and signal processing

Abstract

The GEC Rectangular Image and Data ("GRID" see footnote) processor has the typical SIMD architecture exhibited by such machines as the UCL CLIP4 (Duff, 1980), ICL DAP (Reddaway, 1973) and NASA MPP (Batcher 1980). It has been developed to provide a powerful and flexible system suitable for image and signal processing applications. The major system components have been designed in custom VLSI, giving the GRID a considerable size advantage over existing parallel array processors. This chapter describes both the hardware and software aspects of the GRID system and presents some of the algorithm work relating to the system's image and signal processing capabilities.