Title of thesis : DESIGN AND TESTING METHODOLOGIES FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING SYSTEMS USING DICE

Title of thesis: DESIGN AND TESTING METHODOLOGIES FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING SYSTEMS USING DICE Soujanya A. Kedilaya, Master of Science, 2010 Thesis directed by: Professor Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Embedded computing has witnessed explosive growth in recent years in both scientific and consumer applications, driving the need for high-performance complex digital systems. The design and integration of embedded systems in heterogeneous programming environments is still largely done in an ad hoc fashion, and is especially sluggish in large collaborative projects with globally-distributed design teams, making the overall development process more complicated, error-prone and tedious. This has led to the increased need for systematic and efficient design flows. In this work, we propose enhancements to existing design flows that utilize model-based design to extract dataflow behavior and to verify cross-platform correctness of individual actors. The DSPCAD Integrative Command Line Environment (DICE) is a realization of managing these enhancements to the design flow. DICE, with its platform independent conventions, facilitates the efficient management of design and test of cross-platform software projects, and enjoys a high level of synergy with the Dataflow Interchange Format (DIF), a model-based development environment for signal processing systems. We demonstrate this design flow with two case studies. We use DICE’s novel test framework on modules of a triggering system in the Compact Muon Solenoid of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and demonstrate how the cross-platform modelbased approach, automatic testbench creation and integration of testing in the design process alleviate the rigors of developing such a complex digital system. The second case study is an exploration study into the required precision for eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) using the Jacobi algorithm. This case study is a demonstration of the use of dataflow modeling in early stage application exploration and the use of DICE in the overall design flow. DESIGN AND TESTING METHODOLOGIES FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING SYSTEMS USING DICE