National Instruments has announced its collaboration with Texas Instruments and Spectrum Digital in the development of the new TI C55X power optimisation DSP Starter Kit (DSK), believed to be the industry's first DSP design tool to offer designers incorporated test and measurement functionality.
The new kit incorporates virtual instrumentation - combining NI's 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 the accurate planning, analysing, managing and optimising of real-time power consumption. It offers a ten-times increase in efficiency over traditional methods for power monitoring, which entail purchasing a DSP and expensive power monitoring hardware separately.
Designers can now more easily monitor power at various stages in the DSP chip operation. Understanding a design's power consumption 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.