A co-design methodology for telecommunication systems: a case study of an acoustic echo canceller

Acoustic echo cancellation with large adaptive filters is a computationally intensive problem and needs a real time cost effective solution. To deal with these challenges, designers have increasingly turned to mixed hardware/software (HW/SW) implementation of echo canceller algorithms. We present a co-design methodology and environment for both hardware and software modules. We describe how high level synthesis (HLS) tools like GAUT and SYNDEX can be efficiently used for rapid prototyping of a heterogeneous architecture based on DSP TMS320C40 and ASIC. The HW/SW interface synthesis task is especially discussed since it constitutes a key issue of the whole design. As an illustration, we present a mixed implementation of the GMDF alpha algorithm, an adaptive filter well suited to acoustic echo cancellation, on both ASIC and TS320C40 DSP.