Application of Software design patterns to DSP library design

The design of a hardware data path library is one of the harder problems in design for reuse. Due to the appearance of hardware modeling libraries based on C++, it is possible to apply advanced software techniques to design such a library. This paper shows how software design patterns can be applied to hardware design. Design patterns yield a twofold advantage: a faster design process, and a library that is more extensible and modular than an equivalent HDL counterpart. From a VHDL-C++ design comparison we found that those factors might result in a reduction of the code size by a factor of two.