Hans Schurer, Patrick Meyer, Jan Hunink, THALES Naval Systems Netherlands, Xavier Warzee, THALES Optronics, and Denis Aulagnier, THALES Airborne Sytems.
schurer@signaal.nl
The ESPADON (Environment for Signal Processing Applications Development & prOtotypiNg) program is a European research program in the Eurofinder framework financed by the Ministry of Defence of France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The companies involved are THALES (formerly THOMSON-CSF), BAE SYSTEMS Advanced Technology Centres and Matra BAe Dynamics France. The goal of ESPADON is to develop a new methodology to significantly improve the process by which complex military digital systems are designed, manufactured and supported. The main objective is to reduce product development time, leading to a similar reduction of product and life cycle costs. ESPADON meets these objectives through a combination of advanced design methodology emphasising risk analysis, rapid and virtual prototyping, concurrent engineering, and design reuse. In this talk we will elaborate on the benchmarking of a radar signal processing application using Ptolemy Classic as the rapid prototyping technique. We will present the developments which were done in Ptolemy to be able to automatically generate C-code for a multi-processor target using the standard VSIP Library. Main developments are a reusable library (in the domains SDF, BDF and CGC) with components based on VSIPL, and a multi-processor target for the platform of implementation. The implementation of the radar application is performed on a high-end Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS) platform using crossbar interconnect between processing nodes; a Mercury PowerPC G4 machine.