DSP board gains novel programming support

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Nov 24, 2003

Gedae's novel software development tool is now available for use with the Champ-AV II quad PowerPC digital signal processing board from Dy 4 Systems.

Gedae's novel software development tool is now available for use with the Champ-AV II quad PowerPC digital signal processing board from Dy 4 Systems.

Gedae is a software development tool for multiprocessor DSP systems based on a block-diagram programming paradigm.

The Gedae tool allows a programmer to use a graphical representation to specify the functionality of a system, and then automatically generate code targeted to specific embedded hardware.

The results rival the efficiency of hand-coded applications, but with a dramatic increase in programmer productivity - typically five-fold during development, and even greater for ongoing maintenance of the software.

Gedae-developed applications are inherently portable to any hardware platform supported with a Gedae BSP.

Gedae is used by many leading defence and aerospace contractors around the world.

At a recent users' conference, papers were presented by representatives from BAE Systems, Raytheon, Thales, Qinetiq, EADS, Alenia-Marconi and the US Air Force Rome Labs.

The implementation on Dy 4's Champ-AV II hardware is the first time that Gedae has supported a switch-fabric interconnect.

Gedae takes advantage of Dy 4's IPC interprocessor communications library to perform processor-to-processor data transfers.

The IPC library supports high-performance communications between software tasks, which may be operating on a single processor, or on many processors in a large system interconnected via Dy 4's StarFabric technology with the same software interface.

"The porting effort to the Dy 4 hardware went very smoothly", said Bill Lundgren, president of Gedae.

"We started by using Dy 4's IPC software to communicate between processors on a single board, and once we had verified the correct operation of Gedae on that platform, it was a trivial exercise to extend Gedae to run over StarFabric via the same API.

We are excited that our Gedae customers now have the option to use Dy 4's high-performance rugged DSP products in their deployed systems".

The Gedae port runs with the VxWorks real-time operating system from Wind River.

It also takes advantage of Dy 4's IXLibs-AV DSP function library, which provides Altivec-optimised functions for more than 200 commonly used signal processing functions.

Gedae is available now from Gedae.

The Champ-AV II, IPC, and IXLibs-AV are available from Dy 4.