The software approach to developing Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications brings some appreciable features such as flexibility, re-usability of resources and easy upgrading of applications. However, it requires long tests and verification phases due to the increasing complexity of the software. This implies the need of a software programming environment capable of putting together DSP modules and providing facilities to debug, verify and validate the code. The objective of the work

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... bed in this paper is to provide such facilities as simulation and verification for developing DSP software applications. This led us to develop an extension toolkit, EPspectra, built upon Pspectra, one of the first toolkits available to design basic software radio applications on standard PC workstations. In this paper, we shall firstly present EPspectra, an Esterel-based extension of Pspectra that makes the design and implementation of portable DSP applications easier. It allows drastic reduction of testing and verification time while requiring relatively little expertise in formal verification methods. Secondly, we shall demonstrate the use of EPspectra, taking as an example the radio interface part of a GSM base station. We shall also present the verification procedures for the three safety properties of the implementation programs which have complex control-paths. These have to obey strict scheduling rules. In addition, EPspectra achieves the faithful verification of the targeted application since the model used for the executable code generation and for the formal verification is the same.