[hpsdr] HPSDR / PowerSDR hardware selection

[Lyle Johnson]

>> The only 32-bit floating point embedded DSP I know of that has free 
>> tools is the TMS320VC33 from TI, and it is "no longer recommended for 
>> new designs." ...
> 
> I received an ad email from TI for their TMS320C6713 DSP Starter Kit 
> (DSK), sporting up to 1800 MIPS and 1350 MFLOPS...
> The price of the DSK is 395 USD, not inexpensive, but you need just one 
> for the development...

Yes, to use the '6713 the SDK is enough.  And the $25 TMS320C6000 Code 
Composer Studio Version 1.20 CD-ROMs always on ebay can compile for it, 
too.  But there may be lots of bugs in that early version :-/

One of the disadvantages of these chips is that their Very Long 
Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture makes writing assembly code 
extremely difficult.  The additional performance of the processor may be 
eaten up in C-compiler overhead and inefficiencies, depending on what 
you are doing.  The more DSP-centric the task, the more likely an 
optimized library routine will help speed things up.

AMSAT's (Howard Long's) first Software Defined Transponder (SDX) was 
based on the TMS320VC33.  The next generation demo was, I think, using 
this very DSK and the '6713 processor.  The '6713 definitely had more 
processing horsepower!

The '6726 is even faster, has twice the number of internal registers and 
has a ROM full of useful library routines, so it is even faster and 
supports a wide range of peripheral interfaces.  But there is no 
inexpensive SDK for it :-(

73,

Lyle KK7P


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