Design Space Exploration and Synthesis for Digital Signal Processing Algorithms from Simulink Models

Abstract--- Design teams are increasingly looking for design flows that can rapidly lead to high performance and low power implementation of DSP algorithms. Model-based design can satisfy this requirement, but it must be (1) coupled with efficient high-level synthesis support in order to provide good Quality of Results, and (2) controlled to derive the desired area/performance/throughput trade-off. We present a semi-automatic design flow for rapid high level synthesis-based hardware design space exploration starting from Simulink digital signal processing models. We illustrate our flow with a realistically complex signal processing algorithm for estimating the direction of arrival of a sound source. We show how one can start from a functionally validated fixed point model in Simulink and then go through a relatively simple design flow for hardware synthesis and automatic design space exploration, obtaining a very efficient hardware implementation that is competitive with the RTL implementation generated by another commercial model-based design tool