Design and Simulation of Heterogeneous Systems using Ptolemy

The ambitious objectives of the Ptolemy project include practically all aspects of designing signal processing systems, ranging from the design and simulation of algorithms to the generation of hardware and software, the parallelizing of algorithms, and the prototyping of realtime systems. To manage these abilities, it is essential that the design software be highly modular and extensible, so that the development of subprojects of manageable scope can proceed unencumbered and in parallel, while at the same time allowing subprojects to interact and to be combined into a complete working system description. Since subprojects must use the best available tools (which are often domain-specific), the tools must also be able to interact. The Ptolemy software architecture shows one way in which such interaction can be achieved, using object-oriented principles of polymorphism and information hiding. 1. Introduction In signal processing systems, heterogeneity arises in two ways: . Diverse imp..