DSP-C emulation from ACE offers design flow breakthrough for new architectures

Amsterdam 01 Nov 99 ACE Associated Compiler Experts bv is now offering emulation capability for DSP-C applications. Without having access to the processor, simulator and compiler, DSP application developers are able to functionally emulate their applications for the processor at hand using CoSy generated DSP-C emulators. Emulation can be done locally on a PC or workstation to validate that the application algorithms function as desired.

DSP processor developers benefit from this new CoSy release as well. While application developers can verify their applications earlier with respect to dynamic behavior as quantisation, by performing bit-true emulation even for virtual processors, the design flow is improved and shortened. This capability dramatically increases the opportunity for cost-effective experimentation with new application domains and plays an important role in the hardware/software co-design process.

The C programming language is increasingly used to program DSPs. The DSP-C language extension is particularly suited to compiler development for DSPs, offering fixed-point and saturation arithmetic, circular buffers, and memory spaces, unavailable with the standard C programming language. ACE has developed a set of language extensions and they have been submitted to the relevant working group of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee for inclusion in a next official release of the ISO/ANSI C programming language.

When a new target architecture is being defined for a particular application, developers would like to start porting the application to the new architecture as early as possible. In the past, the only way to test an application at this early stage was to use a compiler and simulator. In this traditional design flow, the development time and completeness of the compiler and simulator is the critical factor and the simulator speed usually is a matter of concern.

With this latest CoSy release, compiler developers can generate bit-true DSP-C emulators for any architecture within minutes. These emulators allow the application developer to functionally test their application long before the chip and common tools are available. Thus, the emulation capability reduces overall development time and increases market opportunity. Also, the CoSy emulation capability works much faster than an instruction set simulator.

 

Ad Emmen

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