A coherent VLSI environment

It is important to know how fast a rise time can be achieved, or at what frequencies unwanted oscillations might occur. A set of necessary and sufficient bounds are now possible, in the sense that every point in the s-plane can be easily discovered to be either a frequency at which oscillation cannot occur with any possible combination of components and ideal transformers, or else a point at which a circuit consisting of a few such components and ideal transformers can be made to oscillate. The inclusion of ideal transformers is necessary since otherwise generally only a finite or countable number of natural frequencies can be found. Many new results have been derived for parallel algorithms and complexity, such as a hypercube with a large number of faulty nodes can be used, with high probability, as another perfectly functioning hypercube of half the size, by using reconfiguration algorithms that are simple, fast, and require only local information. The design of a message-driven processor continues. It is now being realized that many different highly parallel architectures require roughly the same sort of processing node, one that can respond quickly (i.e., with low latency) to messages that may require execution of a few (say about ten) instructions. The processor being designed can be considered an experiment in unifying message passing and shared memory architectures.