A design methodology for high performance ICs: wireless broadband radio baseband case study

In this paper, we provide an overview of the hardware-software design flow that has been applied to the design of a platform based SoC for the HiperLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a wideband wireless communication standards. Starting from a high-level description in MATLAB, the design framework is used to gain important information for the HW/SW partitioning. Step by step the MATLAB description is refined down to an embedded assembler implementation. Simultaneously, the framework is used to generate cycle true reference data for simulations on several abstraction levels. A universal interface concept allows the exchange of modules of different abstraction levels in a cosimulation. This way, a high confidence level for the design verification is achieved, and design and verification time is substantially reduced.