Abstract
Optimum algorithms for signal processing are notoriously costly to implement since they usually require intensive linear algebra operations to be performed at very high rates. In these cases a cost-effective solution is to design a pipelined or parallel architecture with special-purpose VLSI processors. One may often lower the hardware cost of such a dedicated architecture by using processors that implement CORDIC-like arithmetic algorithms. Indeed, with CORDIC algorithms, the evaluation and the application of an operation, such as determining a rotation that brings a vector onto another one and rotating other vectors by that amount, require the same time on identical processors and can be fully overlapped in most cases, thus leading to highly efficient implementations. We have shown earlier that a necessary condition for a CORDIC-type algorithm to exist is that the function to be implemented can be represented in terms of a matrix exponential. This paper refines this condition to the ability to represent , the desired function in terms of a rational representation of a matrix exponential. This insight gives us a powerful tool for the design of new CORDIC algorithms. This is demonstrated by rederiving classical CORDIC algorithms and introducing several new ones, for Jacobi rotations, three and higher dimensional rotations, etc.
