A program development environment for high performance HF modems

The Harris Corporation has developed and manufactured a series of HF modems which incorporate a unique and highly efficient processor architecture. While this architecture has allowed minimization of both the program execution time and the amount of high speed random access memory, it requires a rather Herculean effort to write and debug the programs which implement the various signal processing algorithms. The authors describe a knowledge based development system which greatly simplifies this process and which makes this architecture at least as easy to use as that provided by commercially available signal processing chip sets. The emphasis is on the suite of program development tools and how they facilitate the process of writing and debugging the modem programs. These tools are currently written in Symbolics Common LISP and run on a Symbolics LISP machines