Digital Signal Processing Syst

Digital Signal Processing System-Level Design Using LabVIEW For many years, I have been teaching DSP (Digital Signal Processing) lab coursesusing various TI (Texas Instruments) DSP platforms. One quesTIon I have been getTIngfrom students in a consistent way is, “Do we have to know C to take DSP labcourses?” UnTIl last year, my response was, “Yes, C is a prerequisite for taking DSPlab courses.” However, last year for the first time, I provided a different response bysaying, “Though preferred, it is not required to know C to take DSP lab courses.”This change in my response came about because I started using LabVIEW to teachstudents how to design and analyze DSP systems in our DSP courses.The widely available graphical programming environments such as LabVIEWhave now reached the level of maturity that allow students and engineers to designand analyze DSP systems with ease and in a relatively shorter time as comparedto C and MATLAB. I have observed that many students taking DSP lab courses,in particular at the undergraduate level, often struggle and spend a fair amount oftheir time debugging C and MATLAB code instead of placing their efforts intounderstanding signal processing system design issues. The motivation behind writingthis book has thus been to avoid this problem by adopting a graphical programmingapproach instead of the traditional and commonly used text-based programmingapproach in DSP lab courses. As a result, this book allows students to put most oftheir efforts into building DSP systems rather than debugging C code when takingDSP lab courses.One important point that needs to be mentioned here is that in order to optimizesignal processing algorithms on a DSP processor, it is still required to know and useC and/or assembly programming. The existing graphical programming environmentsare not meant to serve as optimizers when implementing signal processing algorithmson DSP processors or other hardware platforms. This point has been addressed in this book by providing two chapters which are dedicated solely to algorithmimplementation on the TI family of TMS320C6000 DSP processors.It is envisioned that this alternative graphical programming approach to designingdigital signal processing systems will allow more students to get exposed to the fieldof DSP. In addition, the book is written in such a way that it can be used as a selfstudyguide by DSP engineers who wish to become familiar with LabVIEW and use itto design and analyze DSP systems.I would like to express my gratitude to NI (National Instruments) for their supportof this book. In particular, I wish to thank Jim Cahow, Academic Resources Managerat NI, and Ravi Marawar, Academic Program Manager at NI, for their valuablefeedback. I am pleased to acknowledge Chuck Glaser, Senior Acquisition Editor atElsevier, and Cathy Wicks, University Program Manager at TI, for their promotionof the book. Finally, I am grateful to my family who put up with my preoccupation onthis book-writing project.