Automatic generation of a custom digital signal processor for an adaptive robot arm controller

Studies performed on a recently developed adaptive control algorithm for high-performance robots have shown that for an effective implementation, hardware must efficiently support I/O and complex decision-making operations. General-purpose digital signal processors, with their emphasis on high-speed arithmetic computations, do not adequately serve the needs of adaptive control and similar applications. As an alternative the authors have generated a custom circuit for a cost-effective implementation of the algorithm. The generation of the custom circuit is based on a customizable digital signal processor embedded inside a CAD framework for application-specific ICs. With this approach, customized versions of the processor are automatically generated from high-level descriptions of algorithms