Princeton University Office of Technology Licensing and Intellectual Property
Fourth Floor, New South Building
Post Office Box 36 PRIVATE
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-0036
Phone: (609) 258-6762
FAX: (609) 258-1159
A NEW DESIGN FOR SHIFTERS IN COMPUTER PROCESSORS
Researchers at Princeton University have developed a new design for shifters that utilizes Inverse Butterfly or Butterfly Routing Circuits. Princeton is currently seeking industrial collaborators to commercialize this technology.
The design excels in its ability to perform permutations, so it can efficiently perform both existing shift operations (shift, rotate, extract, deposit and mix) that are currently supported by processors, as well as new advanced bit manipulation operations (bit gather or parallel extract, bit scatter or parallel deposit, and bit permutation) that are useful in applications such as cryptology, cryptanalysis, steganography, biometrics and pattern matching.
Since the mix function on current shifters is often performed on a separate multimedia functional unit, while shift, rotate, extract and deposit are performed on a shifter unit, this new design can replace two functional units with a single, more powerful one, reducing area on a chip. This new design has been tested via computer simulation. It has exhibited latency comparable to that of a classic barrel shifter, and almost equal to that of current log shifters.
It is anticipated that this new hardware design can be utilized by microprocessor, embedded processor, ASIP and ASIC implementers.
Patent protection is pending.
For more information please contact:
William H. Gowen
Office of Technology Licensing and Intellectual Property
Princeton University
4 New South Building
Princeton, NJ 08544-0036
(609) 258-6762
(609) 258-1159 fax