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Designing Parameterizable Hardware IPs in a Model-Based Design Environment for High-Level Synthesis

Published: 26 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Model-based hardware design allows one to map a single model to multiple hardware and/or software architectures, essentially eliminating one of the major limitations of manual coding in C or RTL. Model-based design for hardware implementation has traditionally offered a limited set of microarchitectures, which are typically suitable only for some application scenarios. In this article we illustrate how digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms can be modeled as flexible intellectual property blocks to be used within the popular Simulink model-based design environment. These blocks are written in C and are designed for both functional simulation and hardware implementation, including architectural design space exploration and hardware implementation through high-level synthesis. A key advantage of our modeling approach is that the very same bit-accurate model is used for simulation and high-level synthesis. To prove the feasibility of our proposed approach, we modeled a fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm and synthesized it for different DSP applications with very different performance and cost requirements. We also implemented a high-level-synthesis (HLS) intellectual property (IP) generator that can generate flexible FFT HLS-IP blocks that can be mapped to multiple micro-/macroarchitectures, to enable design space exploration as well as being used for functional simulation in the Simulink environment.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
    ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 15, Issue 2
    Special Issue on Innovative Design, Special Issue on MEMOCODE 2014 and Special Issue on M2M/IOT
    May 2016
    421 pages
    ISSN:1539-9087
    EISSN:1558-3465
    DOI:10.1145/2888407
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 26 February 2016
    Accepted: 01 October 2015
    Revised: 01 August 2015
    Received: 01 March 2015
    Published in TECS Volume 15, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. C/C++ hardware IP description
    2. FFT
    3. GPS acquisition
    4. IP generator
    5. Model-based design
    6. audio detector
    7. design reuse
    8. model-based high-level synthesis
    9. parameterized IPs
    10. simulink modeling

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