Digital signal processors for a signal processing laboratory

An undergraduate level laboratory course on digital signal processors and t heir use in real-time digital signal processing (DSP) systems is described. Special emphasis is put on some practical issues such as execution time op timization, finite wordlength effects and a pipelined strategy as a suitabl e way to improve the performance of a real-time DSP system. The primary pur pose of the laboratory is a better understanding of the theoretical concept s and a more active participation of the students in the course. We think t hat this paper will be of interest to those teaching related courses such a s Introduction to DSP, Digital Signal Processing, Real-time DSP, Microproce ssors 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 Bo ating-point alternative. Enough detail is provided in the paper to duplicat e certain parts of the experiments.