Special issue on ASAP 2004 conference

Technical presentation given at the 15th IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP) held in Galveston, Texas in September 2004, are discussed. The topics discussed include various levels of abstraction and integration in the design of special-purpose computing systems, arithmetic, communication, interfaces and memory, instruction set extensions, microarchitecture, compilers and optimization, and scheduling and co-design. An efficient algorithm and hardware design for decimal floating-point division is presented. A systematic design methodology for stride permutations is derived, which leads to scalable networks with a reduction in registers and improved area efficiency. An interface generator and cycle accurate simulation environment for the design of quasi-optimal communication schemes for real-time applications has also been presented.