A Co-Design Methodology for Telecommunication Systems: A Case Study of an Acoustic Echo Canceller

The acoustic echo cancellation with large adaptive filters is a computationally intensive problem and needs real time cost effective solution. To deal with these challenges, designers have increasingly turned to mixed Hardware/Software (HW/SW) implementation of echo canceller algorithms. This paper presents a co-design methodology and environment for both hardware and software modules. We describe how High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools like GAUT and SYNDEX can be efficiently used for rapid prototyping of heterogeneous architecture based on DSP TMS320C40 and ASIC. The HW/SW interface synthesis task is especially discussed since it constitutes a key issue of the whole design. As an illustration, we present a mixed implementation of the GMDF alpha algorithm, an adaptive filter well suited to acoustic echo cancellation, on both ASIC and TMS320C40 DSP.