Bill Hood, Sanders RASSP Program Manager, presented the overview of the Sanders effort. Mr. Hood emphasized the critical role of top-down design and VHDL to build virtual prototypes of new DSPs as the key methodology concept, attributing a 2.2 speedup in design time to these techniques in a flight hardware test case. He went on to describe Sanders' ENTIRE design environment and tools suite, with special attention to the role of data management tools and to the Sanders experience to date in establishing and working in a "virtual corporation" environment.
The ATL effort was summarized by its program manager, Jim Saultz. The ATL development approach has emphasized enhancing and integrating best-of-class technologies required to realize a RASSP design environment. This approach has already benefited the general digital design market through a number of new commercial tool offerings from new and established EDA companies. Mr. Saultz described ATL's efforts in defining an effective approach to DSP architecture that would support the RASSP goals of hardware/software codesign and model year product upgrades and then mapping this approach to EDA tools. Like Sanders, ATL stressed the importance of data management in building a complex RASSP design system.