Frequent items counter based on binary decoders

Abstract

In this paper, the hardware design of frequent items counter is proposed. The key idea is to create a matrix of binary-value by using an array of binary-decoder to decode all of the input items in parallel. After that, an array of population-count modules are applied to the rows of the matrix to generate counting results. The architecture was implemented with five options of bit/item from 6-bit/item to 10-bit/item, and seven options of count-register bit-width from 8-bit counters to 32-bit counters. Therefore, there were 35 different versions of implementation presented in this paper. Those implementations were built on the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board of Altera Arria V SoC development kit. Also, they were synthesized to chips with the process technology of 65 nm Silicon On Thin Buried-Oxide (SOTB). The experimental results of the proposed architecture achieved outstanding timing performances compared to other attempts to date.