Collaboration on virtual instrumentation

Electronics industry giants, National Instruments and Texas Instruments are collaborating with Spectrum Digital in the development of the TI C55X Power Optimisation DSP Starter Kit (DSK), a DSP design tool to offer designers incorporated test and measurement functionality.

The kit incorporates virtual instrumentation - combining National Instruments USB-based measurement hardware with a power monitoring application based on NI LabVIEW software - to deliver a complete set of power estimation and measurement tools for accurately planning, analysing, managing and optimising real-time power consumption. It offers a 10 times increase in efficiency over traditional methods for power monitoring, which entail purchasing a DSP and expensive power monitoring hardware separately.

Because the DSK includes built-in NI software and hardware, designers now can more easily monitor power at various stages in the DSP chip operation.

Understanding the power consumption of a design is not only especially important for engineers developing battery-powered devices - such as digital music players, portable medical equipment and other devices with limited power - but is also significant for optimising energy efficiency in AC-powered designs.

In addition to built-in power monitoring hardware and ready-to-run monitoring software, the TI C55X Power Optimisation DSK includes power scaling libraries as part of the TI Code Composer Studio, and a daughter card interface for features such as screen and fingerprint ID.

Designers can also set triggers in the TI Code Composer Studio that can be read by the Power Monitor application based on LabVIEW to analyse power consumption during a specific code segment.

The DSK is built on a robust C5509A-based target board complete with onboard emulation and board support libraries from Spectrum Digital.

It also provides expansion connectors for custom user logic along with audio input and outputs via an TLV320AIC23B codec.

NI offers additional software and hardware options for designers needing more advanced power-monitoring capabilities with increased accuracy or varied analysis capabilities, including high-performance digital multimeters (DMMs), modular NI SCC signal conditioning systems that engineers can combine with NI PC-based data acquisition devices.

NI also offers powerful software for power monitoring such as VI Logger data-logging software and SignalExpress interactive measurement software.