How rapid is rapid prototyping?

New methodologies, engineering processes and support environments are beginning to emerge for embedded signal-processing systems. The main objectives are to enable industry to field state-of-the-art products in less time and with lower costs, including retrofits and upgrades, based predominantly on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and the model-year concept. One of the cornerstones of the new methodologies is the concept of rapid prototyping. This is the ability to rapidly and seamlessly move from functional design, to architectural design, to implementation, through automatic code generation tools, onto real-time COTS test beds. This paper tries to quantify the term 'rapid' and provides results-metrics-from two independent benchmarks: a radar and sonar beamforming application subset. The metrics show that the rapid prototyping process may be 16 times faster than a conventional process