Digital Signal Processing System-Level Design Using LabVIEW

For many years, I have been teaching DSP (Digital Signal Processing) lab courses
using various TI (Texas Instruments) DSP platforms. One question I have been getting
from students in a consistent way is, “Do we have to know C to take DSP lab
courses?” Until last year, my response was, “Yes, C is a prerequisite for taking DSP
lab courses.” However, last year for the first time, I provided a different response by
saying, “Though preferred, it is not required to know C to take DSP lab courses.”
This change in my response came about because I started using LabVIEW to teach
students how to design and analyze DSP systems in our DSP courses.
The widely available graphical programming environments such as LabVIEW
have now reached the level of maturity that allow students and engineers to design
and analyze DSP systems with ease and in a relatively shorter time as compared
to C and MATLAB. I have observed that many students taking DSP lab courses,
in particular at the undergraduate level, often struggle and spend a fair amount of
their time debugging C and MATLAB code instead of placing their efforts into
understanding signal processing system design issues. The motivation behind writing
this book has thus been to avoid this problem by adopting a graphical programming
approach instead of the traditional and commonly used text-based programming
approach in DSP lab courses. As a result, this book allows students to put most of
their efforts into building DSP systems rather than debugging C code when taking
DSP lab courses.
One important point that needs to be mentioned here is that in order to optimize
signal processing algorithms on a DSP processor, it is still required to know and use
C and/or assembly programming. The existing graphical programming environments
are not meant to serve as optimizers when implementing signal processing algorithms
on DSP processors or other hardware platforms. This point has been addressed in this book by providing two chapters which are dedicated solely to algorithm
implementation on the TI family of TMS320C6000 DSP processors.
It is envisioned that this alternative graphical programming approach to designing
digital signal processing systems will allow more students to get exposed to the field
of DSP. In addition, the book is written in such a way that it can be used as a selfstudy
guide by DSP engineers who wish to become familiar with LabVIEW and use it
to design and analyze DSP systems.
I would like to express my gratitude to NI (National Instruments) for their support
of this book. In particular, I wish to thank Jim Cahow, Academic Resources Manager
at NI, and Ravi Marawar, Academic Program Manager at NI, for their valuable
feedback. I am pleased to acknowledge Chuck Glaser, Senior Acquisition Editor at
Elsevier, and Cathy Wicks, University Program Manager at TI, for their promotion
of the book. Finally, I am grateful to my family who put up with my preoccupation on
this book-writing project.