Rapid prototyping of DSP systems: requirements and solutions

A user friendly environment for the fast prototyping of audio bandwidth digital signal processing (DSP) applications and application specific ICs (ASICs) based on reusable hardware components such as FPGAs, microcontrollers, RAMs, DSP-cores, general DSP processors are presented. The paper describes the different target application domains which have been used as drivers for the development of the emulation environment. It describes the approach followed and solutions for real-time emulation of DSP applications. Both the hardware and software aspects are discussed. It summarizes the requirements which have been met by the above system, and gives some ideas on further work to be performed. This development is the result of the ESPRIT project RETIDES (Real Time DSP Emulation System) sponsored by the European Commission