Accelerating Fixed-Point Simulations Using Width Reconfigurable Hardware Architectures.

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems can be described using either fixed-point or floating-point for their numeric representations. As the general computers use floating-point representation, software-based simulation tools used for modeling and simulation of the arithmetic operations in DSP systems, use floating-point representation as well. However, synthesizing customized hardware for fixed-point arithmetic operations for FPGAs or ASICs is more efficient compared to their floating-point counterparts. Thus it is necessary to convert the representation of a floating-point simulated algorithm on MATLAB for example, to a fixed-point representation which is more suitable for hardware implementation. While former approaches for this conversion step have always been software-based, like on MATLAB itself, this paper presents a new approach to show the possibility of accelerating it by using hardware width reconfigurable designs.