Rapid prototyping of a communication controller for the CAN bus

This paper presents the rapid prototyping process for a communication controller design. It has been specified at a very high abstraction level with no commitment to the final realization architecture. Via VHDL code generation and synthesis a gate level netlist has been generated. For a fast verification of the specification a hardware emulator and a PC have been configured with the design and have been integrated into a real communications network. By this means it has been possible to discover specification failures as fast as possible and to avoid time consuming redesigns.