Integration of an Audio System in a Cortex-M based environment

The increasing Time-to-Market constraints and requests for the reduction of the design cycles are pressuring design and verification teams to find new solutions to decrease the number of respins. Teams shall look forward for the optimization of their methodologies by improving the adaptability of their work with respect to the requests of their clients. Moreover, they shall consider the growing danger of undetected functional failures which alone represents the highest cause of respins along the entire design flow. The first way to react to the noteworthy demand for adaptability can be the employment of new methodologies such as the so-called “platform-based design”. The concept behind this approach relies on an extensive design re-use across different hardware and software tools. Therefore, it primarily looks forward for the evolvability and the adaptability of the hierarchies that define the platform, i.e. the environment that builds the basic architecture exploited in the design process. On the other side, the derivation of functional requirements became a crucial point for the definition of a verification plan and a design plan in order to reduce failures and ease debug. In fact, once they are extracted, designers can design their intellectual properties (IPs) without being directly involved into the development of the verification IPs. The same line of reasoning can be applied to the verification team with respect to the designers. Furthermore, functional requirements can directly narrow the features to be verified and reduce the time demanded by the verification process with respect to a wider range verification. This work focuses on both these solutions by directly enhancing a development platform called ETNA with the integration of a parametrizable Audio System and proposing a new methodology for the derivation of functional requirements. This process passes through the entire design flow, from the analysis of the boundaries to the prototyping on FPGA, and remarks the key characteristics of the platform-based design philosophy of ETNA: evolvability, adaptability and user-friendliness.