Taurus: A multiprocessor DSP prototyping environment

Many signal processing applications are computationally intensive, and cannot be implemented on a single processor. The concept of automatic parallel implementation of such applications on multiple connected processors has attracted attention in recent years. We present a new design environment, Taurus, which allows for automatic parallel mapping of DSP algorithms and applications onto multiprocessor hardware platforms. The front end to Taurus is a standard commercially available software package, and the interconnection topology and the processor specification are user definable. Both transputers and TI TMS320 C40 DSP chips have been used. The system architecture, special features and details of the building blocks are presented and discussed.