A high-level ASIC design tool for digital signal processing

An integrated application-specific IC (ASIC) design environment is realized for high-performance digital signal processing (DSP). Although by necessity more restrictive than a general-purpose ASIC design system, it is able to support the rapid specification and verification of dedicated DSP engines of arbitrary throughput, accuracy and functional complexity. This is achieved by targeting a generic pipelined integer arithmetic processing architecture, which is flexible enough in its use of innate parallelism to meet a wide range of throughput requirements with minimal waste of resources. The principal components of the tool are outlined, and its statistical analysis capability is illustrated with a transversal matched filter example