Algorithms for higher level functions in machine hardware
P.W. Baker · UNSWorks (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) · 2022
The motivation for the research described in this thesis arose out of the Extensible Machine System project carried out in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New South Wales in the early 1970's.A part of the resulting design philosophy was the use of a conventional small computer, used for ''housekeeping", which directed specific tasks to special purpose hardware modules via a data communication path known as an info bus" Such a philo sophy was the natural consequence of the remarkable decrease in cost and improvement in reliability of digital technology witnessed over the last decade.There were thus two areas, likely to involve special purpose hardware, which qualified as obvious candidates for examination.The first was the generation of the elementary functions such as reciprocals, square roots, logarithms, exponentials and the trigonometric functions.The second was the generation of the solutions of differential equations, a task for which digital differential analysers have been specifically designed.The investigation of DDA's is justified because the solutions of differential equations are certainly ''higher level" functions "It is believed that the algorithms developed in this thesis, both for elementary function generation and for digital differential analysers, should allow a-great variety and flexibility in the design of hardware modules for any given extensible machine environment.