A Rapid Prototyping Environment for Wireless Communication Embedded Systems

This paper introduces a rapid prototyping methodology which overcomes important barriers in the design and implementation of digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms and systems on embedded hardware platforms, such as a cellular phones. This paper describes rapid prototyping in terms of a sim-ulation/prototype bridge and in terms of appropriate language design. The simulation/prototype bridge combines the strengths of simulation and of prototyping, allowing the designer to develop and evalu-ate next-generation communications systems partly in simulation on a host computer, and partly as a prototype on embedded hardware. Appropriate language design allows designers to express a commu-nications system as a block diagram, in which each block represents an algorithm specied by a set of equations. Software tools developed for this paper implement these concepts and have been successfully used in the development of a next-generation code-division multiple access (CDMA) cellular wireless communications system. 1