Very large scale integrated circuits for military systems

The integrated circuit (IC) technology which is to be developed under the ongoing Very-High-Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC) program will provide the IC physical characteristics which are necessary for important performance improvements and cost avoidance in many military systems. However, the full realization of the potential benefits of this technology demands new computer architectural concepts based upon new IC functional designs. For the more demanding applications the abandonment of the classical 'Von Neumann' computer organization (in which instructions and data are stored in the memory, fetched, and processed sequentially) is indicated in favor of processor organizations which permit high degrees of concurrency (parallelism and pipelining), local data storage, reconfigurable data paths (in order to minimize the number of memory fetches), etc. Data processors of this form will require new switching circuits and hardware macros (which perform specialized complex operations). This report reviews some of the available design options for circuits of this type.