Design space exploration of DSP applications based on behavioral description models

Exploring different communication architectures and timing behaviors is a key step in modern system design flows. This paper describes a Behavioral Description Model (BDM) that allows design space exploration of DSP applications at different abstraction levels. The proposed approach consists in embedding a sequential function into a BDM object that includes a set of I/O and control processes. Communication architectures and timing behaviors (I/O scheduling, I/O parallelism...) can be varied and easily explored by adding I/O and control code into the dedicated concurrent processes while keeping the functionality description unchanged throughout the refinement steps. Although the proposed approach leads to slower simulations when compared to a rewrite of the specification for the desired I/O scheme, it allows much faster exploration because models do not have to be re-written for every I/O scheme to be explored.