Application description concept with system level hardware abstraction

Within a recent project at Siemens Communication, we developed a new programming concept called virtual radio engine (VRE), with the goal to provide an efficient development environment for software defined radio (SDR) applications. VRE separates the development process into two steps: first, the application is described in a hardware-independent way using the VRE programming language, and then the implementation is done (to a great part) automatically by the VRE code generator system. As the hardware underlying SDR requires parallel architectures of different kinds to achieve the required high performance within a low power consumption budget, hardware-specific requirements are excluded from the VRE program. Instead, a separate hardware description file supplements the program. Therefore, the application can be described without any prior knowledge of the target hardware, and the same program can be implemented on different parallel hardware platforms. This paper concentrates on the VRE programming language and the graphic representation of VRE programs using Simulink. Special emphasis is given to the representation of different types of control flow.