Engineering Commons^™

Multicore, Multithreaded, Phase-Synchronous Fm Sound Synthesizer, Justin Tomlin

Electrical Engineering

This project implements a phase-synchronous FM synthesis algorithm in hardware. Envelope and low frequency oscillator modulation of oscillator parameters is implemented. The microcontroller the system is based on, the XMOS XS1-G4, allows for physical parallelism including features such as multiple cores, multiple hardware threads on each core, a hardware event-driven thread scheduler, and channel, channel ends, and link switches for thread and core communication. The event-driven architecture of this device was ideal for implementing this synthesis algorithm. The final product is portable, durable, has a simple, intuitive user interface, and allows for extensive spectral shaping capabilities. The basic functional requirements …