A more efficient and flexible DSP design flow from Matlab-Simulink [FFT algorithm example]

The design of complex digital signal processing systems implies to minimize architectural cost and to maximize timing performances while taking into account communication and memory access constraints for the integration of dedicated hardware accelerators. Unfortunately, the traditional Matlab/Simulink design flows gather not very flexible hardware blocks. In this paper, we present a methodology and a tool that permit the high-level synthesis of DSP applications, under both I/O timing and memory constraints. Based on formal models and a generic architecture, this tool helps the designer in finding a reasonable trade-off between the circuit's latency and its architectural complexity. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated on the case study of an FFT algorithm.