10 - Hardware and software development tools

Abstract

This chapter discusses hardware and software development tools for digital signal processing (DSP) systems. A simplified DSP system design flow is composed of several main areas such as system requirement definition, development of algorithm, selection of DSP chip, DSP hardware development, DSP software development, system integration, and system debugging and testing. Internet provides numerous resources for the development of DSP systems. Some of these are available from the chip manufacturers for their specific chips. Others are either third-party commercial or shareware. There is also some design software available in the public domain, although they are mainly for non-commercial educational uses. The first generation of DSP chips is programmed primarily by using their assembly languages. High-level language software tools such as compilers are virtually non-existent. However, the use of high-level language such as C for software development in DSP applications has become more common recently. Another high-level language that is gaining popularity is C++. The ability to create new data types and operations using C++ makes it much more flexible compared with C. The use of these user-defined data types and operators gives the compiler more room for optimization. Additionally, object-oriented programming techniques can be used, which makes the program more maintainable.