Engineering Commons^™

Laboratories Teaching Concepts In Microcontrollers And Hardware-Software Co-Design, Daryl G. Beetner, Hardy J. Pottinger, Kyle Mitchell

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Hardware software co-design is becoming increasingly important to the embedded systems industry. It will soon be fundamental to digital systems design. As such, students in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science should be introduced to hardware-software co-design early in their undergraduate education.

We are designing laboratory modules which introduce concepts of hardware-software co-design in an undergraduate's first course on microcontrollers and digital systems design. Students use design automation tools to develop FPGA-based hardware for use with an 8051-microcontroller and use common software development tools to develop microcontroller software in C or assembly language. Co-simulation of hardware and software …

Implementation Of Dsp Applications Using The At&T Dsp32 C Compiler And Application Library, J. Tow, J. Hartung, Steven L. Grant

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The authors briefly introduce the C compiler and the application library for the DSP32 digital signal processor (DSP). Several examples are shown that illustrate the ease of writing C programs for some common filtering applications. In most cases, a small real-time penalty is incurred by using C, rather than assembly language coding. Programming in C, however, allows a dramatic improvement in programmer productivity in terms of implementing, testing, and maintaining an application

A Practical C Language Compiler/Optimizer For Real-Time Implementations On A Family Of Floating Point Dsps, J. Hartung, Steven L. Grant, S. G. Haigh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Digital signal processors (DSPs) have traditionally been used in real-time applications with very high data throughput. For this reason, system designers have been reluctant to accept the degradation in performance inherent in machine code compiled from high-level languages such as C. The problem is compounded by the fact that DSPs use pipelined architectures to achieve their high data throughput, resulting in hazards and latencies between instructions. Simple compiler implementation cannot take advantage of latent instructions, resulting in a conservative and inefficient executable program. This problem has been addressed in the C compiler package for the AT&T WE DSP32 by the …