Implementation in FPGA of Address-Based Data Sorting

The paper describes the hardware implementation and optimization of sorting algorithms that use data items as memory addresses with one-bit flags indicating presence of data. The proposed technique enables such type of address-based sorting to be applied either directly or through tree-walk tables permitting number of bits in sorted data items to be increased by constructing and traversing N-ary trees (N>2) composed of so called no-match and working nodes. The latter are organized in well balanced sub-trees of equal depth. It is allowed more than one data item to be assigned to leaves of working sub-trees and such sets of items are processed by fast acceleration circuits. Experiments and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed technique can be used efficiently in low cost FPGAs.