Cossap stream driven simulator integration with AT&T DSP1610 LFS

COSSAP is a stream driven simulation engine supported by a graphical signal flow graph design entry methodology. The system is delivered with over 800 simulation models, from basic to advanced functions, and user models written in C or Fortran can be easily integrated into the simulation. If a VHDL simulator is available then models in VHDL can be co-simulated with COSSAP. These tools have been used extensively in the design of communication systems. The COSSAP stream driven simulator, because of its inherent data flow structure, is readily integrated with other simulators. Here an integration with the AT&T DSPI610 Linkable Functional Simulator (LFS) is demonstrated. The LFS is a system design tool for the AT&T DSPI610 fixed point DSP. This s stem affords the designer the capability to investigate system partitioning tr ade-offs, y and observe the effects of finite word length arithmetic in the DSP. These mixed level simulations are achieved while working within a single consistent user interface. The consistent user interface minimises the learning curve across the simulation tool set, enabling a high level of productivity to be maintained. A typical design flow might be to investigate the system concept using floating point models, and to iterate the design until the most promising solution is found . At this stage the models can now be migrated to fixed point representation and finite word length effects investigated, and finally the fixed point models translated into code to run on the fixed point DSP. This whole process can be interated until the desired performance is achieved within the overall system constraints. Further, with the mixed level simulation capability the algorithm may be segmented across floating point, fixed point and DSP code implementations as necessary.