Why
should it be necessary to purchase ICAP/4 containing DSP Designer, in addition
to a DSP Development board Answer:
As background, once any DSP development board (i.e., from Microchip, TI,
etc.) is purchased, an engineer will have to engage in a tedious and error-prone
process of programming assembly instructions or C code to enable desired
digital control of a DSP. This is very challenging because errors in the
programming itself, and in the digital control loop algorithms being programmed,
can propagate through without the engineer knowing, thus manifesting inaccuracies
in the DSP's performance. Especially without a DSP development emulator,
it's very difficult and time consuming to wade through assembly instructions
and figure out if coding errors occurred, or if there's an error in the
intended digital control algorithm. Even with an emulator, real-time events
that are paused can burn up components on the DSP board/design. These shortcomings
are well-known and cost time and money, potentially including the cost of
an emulator. With DSP Designer, such challenges are eliminated as the programming
can effectively be visually devised using Z transformations for digital
control algorithms, simulate them with Bode plot representations, and readily
tweak the design for proper performance. The completed design will represent
equivalent micro-code instructions to program into the DSP development board,
a process that's automated from IsSpice4 through an Integrated Development
System resident on the PC. In all, that's a huge amount of capability not
available with a traditional DSP development kit/board. DSP Designer also
provides the ability to "stimulate" the actual DSP board with
transient, DC, and AC signals. An oscilloscope interface then reads the
development board signals back into IntuScope to compare/verify the lab
design performance alongside simulated results.
In summary, a $2,300+ purchase of software containing both ICAP/4 analog
and mixed-signal simulation tools, and DSP Designer, quickly pays for itself
by way of ease of design, time savings, and increased DSP development accuracy.
Of course the user will also have the analog and mixed-signal SPICE simulation
tool suite for other design work. DSP Designer is a $1,320 add-on to any
ICAP/4 package except for Consumer and free demo software. The DSP Designer
price also includes TI and Microchip development boards, and Intusoft's
Solar2TiM dual SMPS evaluation board.
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