Advances in DSP development environments

With sales of programmable DSPs increasing exponentially, the digital signal processing industry has enjoyed explosive growth over the past decade. In the process, the demands on DSP algorithm software have also mushroomed, to the point where the critical path in the DSP development cycle has shifted from hardware to software. Software directly determines time-to-market, and software-development costs outpace those of hardware many times over, demanding advances to DSP development tools. Developing code for general-purpose DSPs is typically a disjointed and difficult task. Character based debuggers, which have limited capabilites and know little of their target, are inadequate for these tasks. But new tools are now available to replace the mishmash of outdated tools for code development and debugging.