Designing globally-asynchronous-locally-system from multi-rate Simulink model

Model-based design (MBD) tools such as HDL Coder from MathWorks are becoming increasingly popular among system designers aiming for fast-prototyping and design reuse. This paper discusses the performance issues related to the synchronous designs generated by HDL Coder for multi-rate systems, and proposes an alternative GALS-based design flow that can achieve high performance efficiency and high design modularity at the same time. Implementation results based on real-time radar signal processing algorithm demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed GALS design style, which can also be traded for area when the performance requirements can be easily met.