Technical discussion of parallel DSP on the TI TMS320C40

The market for digital signal processors (DSPs) is changing at an ever increasing pace. The vast new range of ever more powerful processors being made available is, however, still being out reached by the ever increasing applications to which these devices are being applied. The solution to the problem is parallelism. DSP devices by their very nature are designed to process the maximum amount of data in any particular time. Modern floating point DSPs are now programmable in high level languages and capable of running operating systems. The natural extension of the DSP market is to parallel processing, where again data throughput is often the overriding concern. The author describes the TMS320C40 pDSP, the TIM-40 module specification, the currently available hardware and software and shows how users and systems integrators can benefit from using parallel DSP technology