Practical considerations for a waveform development environment

This paper addresses practical considerations for a waveform development environment, i.e., a system-level tool suite for automated waveform development for software defined radios. There exist various candidates for waveform modeling languages, of which some are better suited than others for unambiguous waveform descriptions. Also, various tools exist that automate parts of the development process, but system-level tools are few and do not adequately address the entire development process of requirements, specification, design, implementation, integration and testing for software and hardware. This paper discusses tools and techniques that can be used to build an integrated development environment that would automate the software waveform development from specification and high-level design to source code implementation.