An FPGA based SIMD processor with a vector memory unit

A SIMD processor that contains a 16-way partitioned data-path is designed for efficient multimedia data processing. In order to automatically align data needed for SIMD processing, the architecture adopts a vector memory unit that consists of 17-bank memory blocks. The vector memory unit also has address generation and rearrangement units for eliminating bank conflicts. The MicroBlaze FPGA based RISC processor is used for program control and scalar data processing. The architecture has been implemented on a Xilinx FPGA, and the implementation performance for several multimedia kernels is obtained