A Simulink-Based Rapid Prototyping Workflow for Optimizing Software/Hardware Programming

The increasing complexity of programming embedded applications, such as signal processing and telecommunications, is accompanied by a rapid increase of multi- cores requirements in terms of speedup and computational power. Further, the software package Simulink is widely used in modeling and validating embedded applications. However, it is well-known that Simulink applications programming into multi- cores is a challenge. In this paper, in order to pass from Simulink applications to an efficient multi-cores implementation, we propose a rapid prototyping workflow starting from Simulink models to code generation. Our proposal allows to automatically transforming Simulink to Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) graph followed by an optimal schedule. The scheduler permits to determine the optimal number of cores and to schedule/map application tasks into the obtained architecture. Hence, an efficient and optimal code C is generated. To show the efficiency of our proposal, we use as case study the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) application. We prove that our proposal is efficient and optimal in terms of speedup and code generation results.