Signal processor contexts with elemental and reserved group addressing

Abstract

The signal processor including a CPU 10 which selects a context register 16, the contents of which configure an address generator 20 and a data type converter 22. A narrow parameter from the CPU 10 produces a broad address for the generator 20 to pass to the memory 28. The converter 22 converts data between memory 28 format and CPU 10 format. A different context register 16 may be selected by each code line of software. The generator 20 preferably calculates a data element length which is the product of an odd number and a power of two, each number being specified in the content of the Context Register 16. Elements are clustered into groups, one group for each element length, and the groups are arranged in order of ascending element length. The index identifying the individual element of a group with a larger element length does not begin with zero (or one). Instead, the lowest index used is sufficiently large that the memory space which would have been occupied with lower indexed elements may instead be occupied by the groups of smaller element lengths.