Correlation techniques are widely used in analog and digital signal processing; e.g. in optiman receiver design. In this paper, a new digital output correlator circuit design is proposed. The correlation results are presented as a binary count of the number of bits in agreement between 31-bit reference and input sequences. Correlation results could be presented at data rates up to about 50MHz. The proposed new circuit could be implemented in a high speed bipolar transistor technology as a monolithic large-scale-integrated circuit with a power dissipation of about .5 watts. A novel pipelined 31-bit digital summing circuit will be presented that employs new multivalued, multithresholded latching and counting circuits in the formation of its binary-coded output. Comparisons with an all-binary digital correlator circuit are made.

Parallel counters are multiple-input circuits that count the number of their inputs that are in a given state. They are useful in implementing parallel multipliers, digital summers, digital correlators, and in other digital signal processing capacities. In this paper, the implementation of parallel counters with four-valued threshold logic is described and these implementations are compared to their binary full adder network counter equivalents. This logic form was selected because of the increasing importance of implementing state-of-the-art digital signal processing systems in large-scale-integrated (LSI) circuit form. LSI circuit designs are, in general, limited by the number of metal signal and power lines that must be placed upon the chip's surface, not by the number of active and passive devices used. Since each signal variable in four-valued logic may assume four logic states, twice the information carrying capacity as in binary logic, an over 50-percent savings in the total number of signal variables required to implement the parallel counter results. Also, with the circuits we describe here, approximately 50 percent fewer transistors and resistors are necessary for the implementation of four-valued logic parallel counters. These savings are attainable with a modest tradeoff in speed and power.

Parallel counters are multiple input circuits that count the number of their inputs that are in a given state. In this paper, the implementation of parallel counters with four-valued threshold logic is described and these implementation are compared to their binary full adder network counter equivalents. Since each signal variable in four-valued logic may assume four logic states, twice the information carrying capacity as in binary logic, an over fifty percent savings in the total number of signal variables required to implement the parallel counter results. With the circuits we describe here, fifty percent fewer transistors and resistors are necessary for the implementation of four-valued logic parallel counters.