Digital Signal Processing

with DSK6713
Instructor Waseem Khan Department of Electrical Engineering

Air University

Objective
The objective of these exercises is to make you learn how to implement DSP algorithms on a DSP kit. DSP kit available to us is based on TIs DSP TMS320C6713. These exercises will be aimed at exploring DSP kit and its allied tools as much as possible. Before lab exercises on DSK we will refresh our minds with Matlab and discuss the how to convert a Matlab code into a DSP program.

Pre-requisite
Signals and Systems C Language (Skill level : medium) Matlab (Skill level : Beginner)

Todays Agenda
Introduction to Digital Signal Processor Why we need a DSP? Comparison of DSPs with general-purpose processors

What is a DSP?
As the name suggests, it is a processor specially designed for processing of a digitized signal.
DSP

A simple digital processing system

Why DSP?
Cant we process a digital signal using a microcontroller or a general purpose processor such as Pentium?
In general, processors perform operations in two major categories i.e. data manipulation, (e.g. word processing and database management), and mathematical calculation (e.g. digital signal processing).

Why DSP?
All processors can perform both tasks. But it is difficult (expensive) to make a device, optimized for both. There are technical tradeoffs in the hardware design, such as the size of the instruction set and how interrupts are handled. DSPs are specially designed to perform the mathematical calculations needed in Digital Signal Processing. General-purpose processors are usually not employed in real-time systems, while DSPs are largely employed in real-time systems.

Real Time System

A real-time system is one that must process information and produce a response within a specified time, else risk severe consequences, including failure. That is, in a system with a real-time constraint it is no good to have the correct action or the correct answer after a certain deadline: it is either by the deadline or it is useless. A real-time system is one whose correctness is based on both the correctness of the outputs and their timeliness. The novelty here is that the system is time critical.

A Simple DSP Problem

Most of the time, a DSP is busy in MAC (multiplyaccumulate) operations.

A Simple DSP Problem

A general-purpose processor which is not optimized for such operations, take many cycles to complete a MAC operation. A DSP having hardware multiply-accumulator can execute a MAC operation in a single cycle. A C6700 DSP has two separate hardware MACs and therefore can perform two MAC operations in a single cycle. Isnt it marvelous?

DSPs versus Microprocessors

Access to memory in general purpose processors

DSP architecture of memory access

DSPs versus Microprocessors

Some of the distinguishing features of a DSP are:
Separate program and data memories (Harvard architecture) Hardware multiply-accumulators (used for convolution) Bit-reversed addressing (useful for FFT) Hardware modulo addressing (useful for circular buffering)