DUAL PROCESSOR MULTI-TASKING DSP SYSTEM

Designed and developed software for a custom board which uses two TMS320C6203 DSPs.  The system makes use of Texas Instruments latest technologies in both silicon and software tools. The purpose of the system is to run proprietary video processing algorithms.

A significant portion of the effort has been devoted to code optimization.  Numerous proprietary video processing routines were provided to New World.  After porting them to the DSP platform their execution time on the 6203 DSP far exceeded the system requirements.  The optimizer provided with the TI compiler was not able to provide us with the necessary results.  See table 1.  New World then redesigned each algorithm to be more CPU efficient while completely preserving the integrity of the algorithms.  The dramatic results are shown in table 2.  We were able to achieve these impressive results not just by using efficient programming practices but by incorporating our knowledge of the DSP's architecture and our knowledge of how the TI optimizer works.

Table 1: Results using only TI optimizer

Table 2: Results obtained by New World optimizing the algorithms before using the TI optimizer

The system makes full use of the 6203's available on chip peripherals including multiple simultaneous DMA transfers, serial port and expansion bus transfers, timers, and numerous external hardware interrupts. 

During the development of this project, New World made extensive use of TI's latest DSP toolset, Code Composer Studio.