2. What are main applications for DSP?
3. What are the most popular DSP processors?
4. How do you program DSP processors?
5. How much faster are DSP processors than standard ones?
Q: What does DSP stand for?
DSP stands for Digital Signal Processing, meaning the processing of signals that have been digitized. It can also stand for Digital Signal Processor, which is a type of processor specifically designed to run DSP programs efficiently.
Q: What are the main applications for DSP?
There are many applications for DSP. The most common are audio and video processing (compression and decompression, noise reduction, echo cancellation). It can also be applied to image processing, and digital communications.
Q: What are the most popular DSP processors?
The most popular DSP processors are the Texas Instruments TMS320Cx, Analog Devices BlackFin and TigerSharc.
Q: How do you program DSP processors?
DSP processors are usually programmed in C. However, to fully take advantage of the custom instructions available in these processors, the programmer needs to utilize special “intrinsics,” or C extensions that allow the programmer to request specific instructions to be generated by the compiler. The result is a hybrid between high-level C, with low-level assembly-like extensions.
Q: How much faster are DSP processors than standard ones?
Depending on how well they fit the instruction set, DSP processors can speed-up signal processing applications by a factors of 2 to 10 when compared to non-optimized versions. To obtain these speedups, algorithms needs to be manually optimized for the specific DSP processor.