A digital-serial silicon compiler

A novel silicon compiler is described, called PARSIFAL. It constructs chips with a data-flow architecture in which data is passed in a digit-wide pipeline form one computational element to the next. The size of a digit can be specified by the user to be any value between one and the full word size of the chip. A digit size of one gives bit-serial chips, whereas a digit-size equal to the word-size gives fully parallel computation. It is shown that an intermediate value of the digit-size usually gives the most efficient chips in terms of throughput per unit area.<>