The following is an excerpt from a recently published white paper. Click the link at the bottom of the excerpt to register and read the entire paper.

Using M and Simulink for DSP Control and Datapath Design

Chris Eddington, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Synplicity, Inc.

Overview

Over the last decade, digital signal processing (DSP) has become a significant part of semiconductor applications and today is a key factor in the progress of wireless communications and digital multimedia products. The algorithms central to these applications continue to become more sophisticated and complex in order to achieve the higher performance and capacity demanded by end-user markets. This results in challenges for IC design teams to deliver increasingly complex IP with faster design cycles.

The EDA (electronic design automation) industry typically addresses this type of productivity challenge with higher levels of abstraction coupled with more automatic paths to implementation. One of many examples was the shift in the early 1990s from schematic capture to the high abstraction/high productivity approach of logic synthesis. The move to formal property checking through property specification languages for higher productivity and more comprehensive IC verification is another. While the need is there today, there is not an equivalent approach for DSP designs that raises the abstraction level together with an automated implementation path.

This paper discusses the tradeoffs of abstraction vs. implementability, and highlights an approach of embedding M into Simulink to gain the advantages of both for integrating control logic into the datapath. By supporting a broad subset of M operators and built-in functions and adhering to some simple programming guidelines, significant efficiencies can be gained in design capture and debugging for certain types of applications.

To read the entire white paper, click here to register.