Abstract
Nowadays, design of embedded systems is confronted with complex
signal processing algorithms and a multitude of computational
intensive multimedia applications, while time to product launch
has been extremely reduced. Especially in the wireless domain,
those challenges are stacked with tough requirements on power
consumption and chip size. Unfortunately, design productivity did
not undergo a similar progression, and therefore fails to cope with
the heterogeneity of modern architectures. Electronic design
automation tools exhibit deep gaps in the design flow like
high-level characterization of algorithms, floating-point to
fixed-point conversion, hardware/software partitioning, and
virtual prototyping. This tutorial paper surveys several promising
approaches to solve the widespread design problems in this field.
An overview over consistent design methodologies that establish a
framework for connecting the different design tasks is given. This
is followed by a discussion of solutions for the integrated
automation of specific design tasks.