Rapid design of discrete orthonormal wavelet transforms

Abstract

A methodology which allows a non specialist to rapidly design silicon wavelet transform cores has been developed. This methodology is based on a generic architecture utilising time interleaved coefficients for the wavelet transform filters. The architecture is scaleable and it has been parameterised in terms of wavelet family, wavelet type, data word length and coefficient word length. The control circuit is designed in such a way that the cores can also be cascaded without any interface glue logic for any desired level of decomposition. This parameterisation allows the use of any orthonormal wavelet family, thereby extending the design space for improved transformation from algorithm to silicon. Case studies for stand alone and cascaded silicon cores for single and multi stage analysis respectively are reported. The typical design time to produce silicon layout of a wavelet based system has been reduced by an order of magnitude. The cores are comparable in area and performance to hand crafted designs. The designs have been captured in VHDL so they are portable across a range of foundries and are also applicable to FPGA and PLD implementations.