[hpsdr] DSP chips

[Philip Covington]

On 10/15/06, Howard Long <hlong at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Hi Phil
>
> > Are there any 32 bit DSP chips from either TI or
> > Analog that has free development tools?
>
> ADI Blackfin has a GNU tool chain. I have never used them, although when
> choosing the devices for use in the AMSAT-UK SDX over here in Europe about
> 1.5 years back I took note of the maturity of tools when making the
> decision. At that stage I did not feel that the Blackfin GNU tools, in
> particular gdb, were mature enough.
>
> The dev tools that come with the $399 TI 6713 DSK will produce code for
> other non-DSK platforms but the IDE (and thus the debugger) is tied to the
> DSK board integrated USB JTAG and will not work with any other JTAG
> emulators. If you want to debug without the DSK sadly you need the uber
> expensive Code Composer Studio dev tools. At the time, I felt that we could
> build a cut down DSK and fly that, although things have rather moved on
> since then!
>
> You can make the TMS320VC33 DSK tools compile code too for non-DSK
> applications.
>
> The 672x devices now slated for use on the SDX are pretty similar to the
> 6713, but the on chip peripherals are different, some very different, like
> the DMA.
>
> At a TI course I attended earlier this year there was a brief talk about GNU
> tools for the TI devices, but I am sure it's nowhere near as advanced as
> that with the Blackfin device.
>
> Among other decision making axioms was that for our project we wanted a
> floating point CPU and the Blackfin is fixed point.
>
> In general, for the SDX project the algorithm code is developed on the PC
> first using a soundcard and then it's ported to the TI device using a
> different "HAL" library. Of course, at the hardware layer everything is
> different, but the algorithm code is identical execept that we occasionally
> poke in a conditional compilation to take advantage of DSP specific explicit
> instructions (eg, high precision divides and square roots on DSPs in general
> are not at all time efficient).
>
> By the way, this is the AMSAT-UK prototype SDX.
> http://www.g6lvb.com/img_1814.jpg and
> http://www.g6lvb.com/eseosdx.tif
>
> 73, Howard G6LVB

Cool, thanks for the links...very interesting...

73 de Phil N8VB

 1160939179.0