Catalyst: a DSIP design flow development in industry

Abstract

The Motorola System on Chip Design Technologies (SoCDT) team aims at providing a system design environment for its customers. The Toulouse branch concentrates on design efforts incorporating DSP functionality. This is referred to as the Catalyst methodology. We found that in current systems, very often the software development cycle is longer than that of the silicon development. To ease the software burden, we have changed the silicon architecture and its flow to permit the DSP software to be written in the C language instead of assembler code, as is normally done. The resulting architecture is domain specific; it is smaller, has a reduced design cycle and is simpler to implement because it is tuned to the application software we are providing. The paper describes the methodology which we are developing to create domain specific architectures, it shows one example architecture and aspects which are critical for industry acceptance.