1.1 The Long Story

1.1 - THE LONG STORY

The goal of this section is to give some meat (and the background) to our base statements.But it does not try to discuss or justify any of our choices.

• As mentionned in the introduction, we are in the very comfortable position of presenting a system which is outside reality. 
• In effect, all decisions have NO tangible reasons (such as based on cost, design time or available tools and platforms).
• It is all in the eyes of the beholder.

Q&A

• DSP architect is Dead?
• Today DSP architect job's split: 95% platform, 2% Core, 3% tools.
• PLATFORM: 
• Is there a DSP architect in the house? No, he is split into pieces
• The system guy (m-code and simulation) --> 90% of the work
• The DSP guy (*) --> 10% of the work
• The firmware guy: can take the job of the DSP guy, especially writing in C
• The ASIC/FPGA designer:  can take the job of the DSP guy.
• From above, the REAL DSP architect is the system guy? yes
• But this guy is not (does not want to be) an architect
• {..} Here would come all the efforts such as Matlab to C/verilog, System C, etc,, and in general all the failures of the Tool vendors to provide a flow:system to implementation.  

• Why customisation?
• Because we used to be vertical, went horizontal and now we are back to vertical.
• What is accelerated processing? 
• see  IEEE micro july/aug 2008
• Why Matlab? 
• Because it is the most popular system tool.
• Also Matlab is much more than a language (randy's 3 things 1):
• a language, *** 
• an EDE  ****
• a simulation environment *****
• Matlab is not a concurent language (contrary to verilog). Does that prevent you from sleeping? here i avoid the use of the word parallelism because of the funny parfor. 
• What is mapping?
• An analogy: mapping is hardmacro, compiling is soft macro
• An approximation: mapping is by hand, compiling use a tool.
• An aromatism: mapping is an assembler macro, compiling is C
• Can mapping be used with a compiler? 
• You bet! As a matter of fact, it is the only way to be succesful.

Subsections

1. DSP Architecture Today
2. Why Matlab?
3. Sad state of software