Architectural exploration in biomedical hardware design using a novel behavioral synthesis methodology

Medical diagnostics are changing rapidly, aided by a new generation of portable equipment and handheld devices that can be carried to the patient´s bedside. Processing solutions for such equipment must offer high performance, low power consumption and also, minimize board space and component counts. Such a multi-objective optimization can be performed with behavioral hardware synthesis, offering design quality with significantly reduced design time. In this paper, an architectural exploration of the hardware implementation of a known QRS detection algorithm is performed, following a rapid prototyping approach offered by an advanced behavioral synthesis framework. Experimental results show that with this approach performance improvements are introduced with a fraction of design time, reducing dramatically time-to-market for modern diagnostic devices.