Experience With The CMU Programmable Systolic Chip
Allan L. Fisher, H. T. Kung, Kenneth Sarocky · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1984
The CMU programmable systolic chip (PSC) is an experimental, microprogrammable chip designed for the efficient implementation of a variety of systolic arrays. The PSC has been designed, fabricated, and tested. The chip has about 25,000 transistors, uses 74 pins, and was fabricated through MOSIS, the DARPA silicon broker, using a 4 micron nMOS process. A modest demonstration system involving nine PSCs is currently running. Larger demonstrations are ready to be brought up when additional working chips are acquired. The development of the PSC, from initial concept to a silicon layout, took slightly less than a year, out testing, fabrication, and system demonstration took an additional year. This paper reviews the PSC, describes the PSC demonstration system, and discusses some of the lessons learned from the PSC project.