DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE TRADE OFFS IN THE USE OF SI VLSI AND GALLIUM ARSENIDE IN HIGH CLOCKRATE SIGNAL PROCESSORS.

An examination of the characteristics of present and future generation GaAs integrated circuits indicates that they will complement, not compete with, the capabilities of silicon VLSI circuits; the former will emphasize moderate on-chip gate counts and high gate speeds, while the latter will exploit slower individual gates but high gate counts. Complete advantage can be taken of GaAs digital technology only if traditional signal processor architectures are completely recast at the memory layout, logic design, arithmetic implementation, and system architecuture levels.