With the approach used, the performance analysis models and functional models can be developed and modified independently. In addition, the tools and methodologies supporting high abstraction level system design have been researched in more general level. The objective has been to develop and demonstrate a virtual prototyping environment, where different description methods and simulation environments can be combined into a single large system simulation. Different functionalities of the system are to be modelled with a description language which is the most suitable for the entity and the interfaces with the different simulators provide the links for the data and information transfer. Another research topic has been the formal specification.
Special attention is placed on maintaining the safety and liveness properties of the specification.
The basic principles of the design methodology have developed including principal demonstrations of action based scheduling of hardware resources. The main research topic has been the constant geometry architectures for discrete trigonometric transforms and Viterbi decoding. This partial column architecture is scalable allowing the number of computational resources to be selected according the requirements of the application. An integral part of the architecture is dynamic permutation network and a novel interconnection network structure, Sequential Perfect Shuffle Network, has been developed and network structures supporting two-dimensional data sets are researched. Another research topic has been the distance transforms for image processing applications.