A rapid turnaround design of a high speed VLSI search processor

Performance of relational database systems is a major impediment to their use in many applications. We have designed and implemented a customized RISC processor to accelerate associative search and aggregation operations for relational database systems. Since the processor is programmable and supports many queries concurrently, a system utilizing tens of such processors is capable of handling thousands of complex search requests simultaneously.

While the design of a VLSI programmable processor is a complex process, research prototyping requires a fast turnaround design process. We took advantage of the logic programming paradigm and the silicon compiler technology to explore and simulate architecture alternatives prior to the actual implementation. The prototyping process allowed us to complete the chip design in nine months. The resulting processor, fabricated in 2 Itm CMOS technology, consists of 91,000 transistors, executes over 18 million predicate evaluations per second, and searches database contents at 74 megabytes per second.