Future design methods for DSP system design

The author first describes the state of the art ´DSP system design flow´ and the different process steps that are part of it. In a second part an overview is given of DSP station, a new commercial CAE tool, that fully supports this design flow and thus allows for both a major reduction of design time/time to market and an increase of the quality of the final implementation in terms of performance, cost and power consumption. Furthermore, he reports on research activities which are currently ongoing and which produce prototype tools to further enhance the design environment for DSP systems. Finally, he describes how the DSP system design flow will continuously move upwards to higher levels of abstraction, to the support of SW/HW co-design, partitioning, fast trade-off analysis and the architectural synthesis of heterogeneous systems in general.