Old Tricks for a New Dog: An Innovative Software Tool for Teaching Real-Time DSP on a New Hardware Platform
Abstract
Many university DSP courses have made use of the excellent and affordable tools provided by Texas Instruments, such as the C6000-series of DSP Starter Kits (DSKs). The most recent tool, the LogicPD Zoom™ OMAP-L138 eXperimenter Kit, featuring Texas Instruments' dual core SoC (ARM9 and a C6748 VLIW DSP), is an even more capable and affordable DSP development system for educators and industry engineers. While this new experimenter kit has several improvements over the TMS320C6713 DSK, the host computer-to-experimenter kit communication techniques have changed dramatically. This paper discusses the continuing evolution of the winDSK software program that was necessary to support this new system. Specifically, winDSK8 was developed to support the C6748 DSP core within the OMAPL138 SoC using the ARM9 core as the system's communication interface. Educators can use the OMAP-L138 eXperimenter Kit not only for DSP education with a higher performance processor than before, but can use this to introduce the concepts of multi-core devices and system-on-chip designs in a practical way.