A Consistent Design Methodology for Wireless Embedded Systems

Abstract

Complexity demand of modern communication systems, particularly in the wireless domain, grows at an astounding rate, a rate so high that the available complexity and even worse the design productivity required to convert algorithms into silicon are left far behind. This effect is commonly referred to as the design productivity crisis or simply the design gap. Since the design gap is predicted to widen every year, it is of utmost importance to look closer at the design flow of such communication systems in order to find improvements. While various ideas for speeding up designs have been proposed, very few have found their path into existing EDA products. This paper presents requirements for such tools and shows how an open design environment offers a solution to integrate existing EDA tools, allowing for a consistent design flow, considerably speeding up design times

Evaluation and exploration of RFID systems by rapid prototyping

“…In between those two extremes, rapid prototyping environments provide a high degree of flexibility and allow to experimentally explore RFID systems in various aspects. Following the concept of rapid prototyping, high-level simulation code is consistently mapped to more detailed descriptions and is eventually also executed on a hardware platform [32][33][34]. The focus is rather on a rapid than on an optimized implementation of an algorithm in order to get access to experimental system evaluation at an early stage of the design process.…”

A Fully Automated Environment for Verification of Virtual Prototypes

“…However, when the VP design environment is integrated into a unified design methodology, it is possible to make VP generation a fully automated process. This helps eliminate human errors and drastically decrease the time needed to create a VP, in turn deriving maximum possible efficiency gain promised by virtual prototyping [13,14]. This is illustrated in Figure 4.…”

Structural Verification in Minimal Time

“…Already up to 70% of development time is spent on verification and testing [1], [2]. Verification is done on many different design levels starting on algorithmic level down to architecture level and finally ends after production [3], [4]. CoWare [5] gives an example, where a simulation of four seconds in real-time takes five minutes simulation time at the algorithmic level.…”