A low-power, 32-bit RISC processor with signal processing capability and its multiply-adder

Abstract

A 500 mW, 100 MHz, 32-bit RISC microprocessor, designed for software signal processing is described. Its signal processing oriented instruction set includes fast integer/fixed-point multiply/multiply-accumulate instructions, minimum/maximum instructions and conditional branch instructions with prediction etc. The processor integrates a 200 MHz, 32-bit compact multiply-adder with a parallel overflow detector in its pipeline to achieve peak signal processing performance of 200 MOPS. Through the employment of this fast multiply-adder, this microprocessor is able to obtain higher signal processing performance than other RISC processors.