Why hands-on and why real signals?

Abstract

Digital signal processing (DSP) has been taught at the University of Reading since 1987 to all second year undergraduates in electronic engineering. The teaching includes hands-on laboratory work using an audio-band DSP system built around a Texas Instruments TMS320C25 digital signal processor. Analogue input and output signals are used, digitised to 10-bits at a sample rate of up to 48 kHz. Some anecdotal evidence is given to support the author's belief that hands-on experience of DSP with real signals and real instruments is an essential part of any undergraduate course or series of courses in DSP. A further aspect of DSP teaching with real signals and instruments is the opportunity it provides to develop students' general skills in electronics laboratory work. The rest of the paper presents a brief overview of the laboratory work run at the University of Reading followed by a discussion of specific aspects of the teaching which seem to be of benefit to students, including demonstration of aliasing and quantization noise, the effects of anti-alias and signal recovery filters and the manner in which transversal filter coefficients are loaded into the DSP system.