Design exploration and HW/SW rapid prototyping for real-time system design

Embedded signal processing systems are usually associated with real-time constraints and/or high data rates so that fully software implementation are often not satisfactory. In that case, mixed hardware/software implementations have to be investigated. However the increasing complexity of current applications makes classical design processes time consuming and consequently incompatible with an acceptable time to prototype. To address this problem, we propose a system-level design based methodology that aims at unifying the design flow from the functional description to the physical HW/SW implementation through functional and architectural flexibility. Our approach consists in automatically refining high abstraction level models through the use of an electronic system-level tool. We illustrate our methodology with the design of a wireless communication system.