Digital signal processors for a signal processing laboratory

An undergraduate level laboratory course on digital signal processors and their use in real-time digital signal processing (DSP) systems is described. Special emphasis is put on some practical issues such as execution time optimization, finite wordlength effects and a pipelined strategy as a suitable way to improve the performance of a real-time DSP system. The primary purpose of the laboratory is a better understanding of the theoretical concepts and a more active participation of the students in the course. We think that this paper will be of interest to those teaching related courses such as Introduction to DSP, Digital Signal Processing, Real-time DSP, Microprocessors and Hardware/Software Interaction. The well-known Texas Instruments' TMS320C2x and TMS320C5x fixed-point processors are used as the fundamental tool in the lab experiments and the TMS320C3x is suggested as a low-cost Boating-point alternative. Enough detail is provided in the paper to duplicate certain parts of the experiments.