Automated Floating-point to Fixed-point Conversion with the fixify Environment

Conversion from floating-point to fixed-point formats is a nec-essary step in the design process of embedded systems and is tradi-tionally performed manually. Automating this conversion process brings significant and much needed improvement in the efficiency of the design process. The fixify environment presented here fully automates the conversion process and comprises three optimiza-tion methods. The restricted-set full search algorithm is suited to designs that will be implemented on DSP cores and is, for such de-signs, guaranteed to find globally optimal solutions. On the other hand, the greedy search algorithm finds solution in the continuous search space and produces nearly optimal results, with the short-est required runtime. The branch-and-bound algorithm also works in the continuous search space and finds optimal solutions, but re-quires relatively long runtimes. 1