Efficient Design Methods for Embedded Communication Systems

Nowadays, design of embedded systems is confronted with complex signal processing algorithms and amultitude 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.