Parallel generation of permutations on systolic arrays

We present a systolic algorithm to generate all the n! permutations of n given items. The computational model used is a linear systolic array consisting of n identical PEs. This algorithm requires n! time steps to solve this problem. Since any PE is identical and executes the same program, it is suitable for VLSI implementation. The correctness of the algorithm is proved. We also consider the ranking and unranking functions of permutations in this parallel algorithm