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Abstract

The complexity of DSP systems grows at an ever-increasing rate while the implementation of these designs must meet criteria like minimum cost and a short time to market. Hence there is a growing need for efficient design automation and a seamless design flow that allows the execution of the design steps at the highest suitable level of abstraction.

Especially for the design of fixed-point algorithms and systems, tool support is very rare, though for most digital systems the design has to result in a fixed-point implementation. This is due to the fact that these systems are sensitive to power consumption, chip size and price per device. Fixed-point realizations outperform floating-point realizations by far with regard to these criteria. On the other hand, algorithm design starts from a floating-pointdescription in order to initially abstract from all fixed-point effects. The resulting gap between the floating-point prototype and the fixed-point implementation represents one of the major bottlenecks in today’s digital designs.

This paper will give a survey of FRIDGE1, a tool suite that permits a seamless design flow, starting from an ANSI-C floating-point algorithm which is then converted to a fixed-point description in fixed-C2. This bit-true description of the algorithm can finally be mapped to different implementation targets, programmable DSPs or dedicated hardware structures.

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© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Keding, H., Coors, M., Meyr, H. (2002). Efficient Design Flow for Fixed-Point Systems. In: Helfenstein, M., Moschytz, G.S. (eds) Circuits and Systems for Wireless Communications. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47303-8_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47303-8_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-7722-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-306-47303-6

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