Signal processing platform: a tool chain for designing high performance signal processing applications

Embedded signal processing applications require high-performance in a small form-factor and low-power, necessitating the use of heterogeneous execution platforms including modern FPGAs with embedded processor cores. We present SPP, a tool chain that supports model-based design of such high-performance signal processing applications. The tool chain consists of a semantically rich modeling environment, a design-space exploration tool, analysis tools, a synthesis tool and a heterogeneous dataflow execution platform. These tools are connected in a tool chain through a set of model translators supporting a coherent and consistent design flow. The emphasis of the paper is on the signal processing modeling language, its syntax and semantics.