Designing digital video systems: Modeling and scheduling

Abstract

An advanced Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) system is used as a design driver for an IF-based real-time design methodology explored in the ESPRIT/OMI COSY project. The design methodology is supported by the Felix VCC environment, provided by a COSY partner Cadence, and tool-set developed for COSY. In this paper, we focus on two key aspects of the design: behavior modeling and code generation. For the behavior modeling, we present the model of computation used to represent the DVB and the technique for expressing this particular model with the more general model of computation supported by the Felix technology. In a companion paper, the architecture selection and communication refinement are described. Once the architecture is selected and a partitioning has been decided, the implementation phase starts. In this phase, for most system designs, a great deal of software has to be written to "customize" the programmable components of the architecture. Obtaining an optimized and correct-by-construction software implementation is fundamental in an effective design methodology. Here we focus on a software generation technique which aims to reduce run-time overhead for functions executed on a single CPU, by generating a minimal number of run-time tasks.