Overview of the Hardware and Software Tools

The purpose of this initial chapter is to introduce you to the main features of the hardware and software tools that will be used in this course. A variety of signal processing and communication system components will be implemented by writing C and/or assembly language programs for the TMS320C6701 floating-point DSP in our lab. The TMS320C6701 resides on a board Texas Instruments (TI) calls the TMS320C6701 Evaluation Module (EVM) which plugs into a PCI slot inside the PC. The TMS320C6701 communicates with the analog world through a CRYSTAL CS4231A stereo codec on the EVM board and the host PC thorough the PCI bus. The experiments in this book can be easily modified for a much cheaper external board using a TMS320C6711 floating-point DSP which TI calls the TMS320C6711 DSP Starter Kit (DSK) and connects to the PC’s parallel printer port. The DSK has a TI TLC320AD535 codec which is configured with a mono audio input, stero speaker outputs, and a fixed sampling rate of 8 kHz. An inexpensive audio daughter card can be bought for the DSK which has a Burr Brown PCM3003 stereo audio codec with a sampling rate that can be varied up to 48 kHz. It is important to have a general picture of the hardware platform so you will understand how to write programs to accomplish the desired tasks.