Gabriel: a design environment for DSP

Abstract

Gabriel is a software system intended to manage the complete development of real-time digital signal processing (DSP) applications, from conception and experimentation to implementation in real-time hardware. It performs non-real-time simulations as well as code synthesis for real-time hardware. It is intended to ease code development for architectures that are not easy targets for conventional compilers, such as multiprocessor systems built with very high-performance microcoded DSPs. The system is designed to be retargetable in two ways. First, it can synthesize code for a variety of multi-DSP architectures where the user specifies the salient features of the architecture. Second, it can target different DSPs. The authors have concentrated on code generation for the Motorola DSP56001, although code generation for the AT&T DSP32 has been demonstrated. At the highest level, an algorithm is described using a hierarchical block diagram. At the lowest level, the user can either simulate the algorithm locally on the workstation, simulate the target architecture running the generated code, or download the code into hardware and run it in real time. Gabriel is capable of handling multiple sample rates, iteration, and recurrences. >