Design and DSP Implementation of Fixed-Point Systems

This article is an introduction to the FRIDGE design environment which supports the design and DSP implementation of fixed-point digital signal processing systems. We present the tool-supported transformation of signal processing algorithms coded in floating-point ANSI C to a fixed-point representation in SystemC. We introduce the novel approach to control and data flow analysis, which is necessary for the transformation. The design environment enables fast bit-true simulation by mapping the fixed-point algorithm to integral data types of the host machine. A speedup by a factor of 20 to 400 can be achieved compared to C++-library-based bit-true simulation. FRIDGE also provides a direct link to DSP implementation by processor specific C code generation and advanced code optimization.