Automated floating-point to fixed-point conversion with the fixify environment

Conversion from floating-point to fixed-point formats is a necessary step in the design process of embedded systems and is traditionally performed manually. Automating this conversion process brings significant and much needed improvement in the efficiency of the design process. The fixify environment presented here fully automates the conversion process and comprises three optimization methods. The restricted-set full search algorithm is suited to designs that will be implemented on DSP cores and is, for such designs, guaranteed to find globally optimal solutions. On the other hand, the greedy search algorithm finds solution in the continuous search space and produces nearly optimal results, with the shortest required runtime. The branch-and-bound algorithm also works in the continuous search space and finds optimal solutions, but requires relatively long runtimes.