Architectural exploration in biomedical hardware design using a novel behavioral synthesis methodology

Medical diagnostics are changing rapidly, aided by a new generation of portable equipment and handheld devices that can be carried to the patient's bedside. Processing solutions for such equipment must offer high performance, low power consumption and also, minimize board space and component counts. Such a multi-objective optimization can be performed with behavioral hardware synthesis, offering design quality with significantly reduced design time. In this paper, an architectural exploration of the hardware implementation of a known QRS detection algorithm is performed, following a rapid prototyping approach offered by an advanced behavioral synthesis framework. Experimental results show that with this approach performance improvements are introduced with a fraction of design time, reducing dramatically time-to-market for modern diagnostic devices.