1 Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) A Consistent Design Methodology to Meet SDR Challenges

Subject Area: Identifying important new research areas for wireless communication systems beyond the third generation.

Efficient Design Methods for Embedded Communication Systems

Nowadays, design of embedded systems is confronted with complex signal processing algorithms and a multitude of computational intensive multimedia applications, while time to product launch has been extremely reduced. Especially in the wireless domain, those challenges are stacked with tough requirements on power consumption and chip size. Unfortunately, design productivity did not undergo a similar progression, and therefore fails to cope with the heterogeneity of modern architectures. Electronic design automation tools exhibit deep gaps in the design flow like high-level characterization of algorithms, floating-point to fixed-point conversion, hardware/software partitioning, and virtual prototyping. This tutorial paper surveys several promising approaches to solve the widespread design problems in this field. An overview over consistent design methodologies that establish a framework for connecting the different design tasks is given. This is followed by a discussion of solutions for the integrated automation of specific design tasks. Copyright © 2006 M. Holzer et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1

A fully automated environment for verification of virtual prototypes

The extremely dynamic and competitive nature of the wireless communication systems market demands ever shorter times to market for new products. Virtual prototyping has emerged as one of the most promising techniques to offer the required time savings and resulting increases in design efficiency. A fully automated environment for development of virtual prototypes is presented here, offering maximal efficiency gains, and supporting both design and verification flows, from the algorithmic model to the virtual prototype. The environment employs automated verification pattern refinement to achieve increased reuse in the design process, as well as increased quality by reducing human coding errors. Copyright © 2006 P. Belanović et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1

Automatic generation of virtual prototypes

Virtual prototyping as an embedded system design technique has the potential to significantly increase efficiency of the design process. An environment for automatic generation of virtual prototypes (VPs) directly from algorithmiclevel descriptions is presented here. It is implemented as part of a unified design methodology and produces VSIA compliant VPs. When applied to an industrial design flow of a UMTS receiver, this environment for automatic generation of VPs produced significant speedups over traditional manual VP creation, with savings in the order of hundreds to thousands of person-hours. 1

TAGUNGSBAND-1- MIKROELEKTRONIK 2003 DESIGN METHODOLOGY FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS

Design of modern wireless communication systems is increasingly inefficient. A lot of different problems arise, which require an improvement of currently used design methodologies. Significant increases in efficiency, reduction of time to market and improvement in quality can be achieved by adopting a consistent design methodology

EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 2005:16, 2598–2612 c ○ 2005 P. Belanovićetal. A Consistent Design Methodology for Wireless Embedded Systems

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

A Fully Automated Environment for Verification of Virtual Prototypes

<p/> <p>The extremely dynamic and competitive nature of the wireless communication systems market demands ever shorter times to market for new products. Virtual prototyping has emerged as one of the most promising techniques to offer the required time savings and resulting increases in design efficiency. A fully automated environment for development of virtual prototypes is presented here, offering maximal efficiency gains, and supporting both design and verification flows, from the algorithmic model to the virtual prototype. The environment employs automated verification pattern refinement to achieve increased reuse in the design process, as well as increased quality by reducing human coding errors.</p