DESIGNING AN EMBEDDED OPERATING SYSTEM WITH THE TMS320 FAMILY OF DSPS

Application software targeted for today's digital signal processors (DSP) is becoming more complex. DSPs are now incorporated with numerically intensive algorithms and must perform complex system control and communication protocols previously relegated to general-purpose microprocessors. When a complicated control is mixed with DSP software, the problem arises of how to implement a real-time kernel.

The Texas Instruments (TI(TM)) TMS320 family of DSPs has evolved over the years from a simple attached numbers cruncher to a system on a chip. Sophisticated telecommunication systems are developed with TI DSPs such as the TMS320C5x, TMS320C54x, and TMS320C6x, which have MIPS greater than 50. As a result, more and more engineers face the problem of combining a previously implemented microcontroller base and their DSP code to implement a real-time operating system (OS).

This application note previews some of the problems facing designers of real time operating systems, and discusses how future applications with real time kernels will be implemented with high-speed DSP chips such as the Texas Instruments TMS320 series.

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