A comprehensive ASIC/FPGA prototyping environment for exploring embedded processing systems for advanced driver assistance applications

The development of complex algorithms for advanced driver assistance systems is a challenging task, due to the high innovation rate and processing demands of applications in this field. The development is usually supported by a software development framework that provides an infrastructure (e.g., access to sensor data) that simulates and evaluates the algorithms. One problem, especially with computationally intensive algorithms, is the slow simulation speed. This paper presents a prototyping environment that connects a software development framework with a FPGA-based hardware platform. This allows implementing computationally intensive tasks in hardware. The proposed rapid prototyping system not only reduces the simulation time, thereby allowing the software designer to evaluate algorithmic parameters with quicker feedback, but also allows verifying and evaluating hardware modules for rapid prototyping. A case study is presented in which a traffic sign detection algorithm is implemented on a soft-core processor. By using the hardware implementation the simulation was accelerated by a factor of 65, compared to the pure software implementation.