The Rapid Prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) program seeks an improvement in the time required to take a design from concept to fielded prototype or to upgrade an existing design, with similar improvements in design quality and life cycle cost. The term Rapid System Prototyping signifies the need to develop systems in significantly less time or with significantly less effort, and thus provides a solution to the main problem facing the design community. Entire systems are synthesized from models in hardware description languages (HDLs). The goal of this thesis is to provide a methodology for rapidly creating a database, that can be reused thus decreasing design cost and time for both current and future projects. To demonstrate the methodology, this thesis describes the development of VHDL primitives supporting digital signal processing (DSP) and image processing operations for two of the RASSP specific applications: 1) Synthetic aperture radar image processor (SAR) and 2) Automatic target recognition (ATR) image processing algorithm. Different techniques are investigated to populate these VHDL libraries using commercial tools. The thesis proposes techniques for solving some problems related to the use of commercial tools to generate VHDL code. It includes a full implementation of the SAR processor algorithm developed from DSP primitives. / Master of Science