The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville has initiated the development of a comprehensive laboratory which provides "hands-on" education in digital signal processing, control, robotics, and communications. Two adjacent and identical rooms with an area of 1500 square ft. are provided for this lab. There are 12 workstations in each room. The main components of these workstations are: TMS320C30 DSP Evaluation Board, an IBM 386/25 MHz computer, DSP hardware and software development systems. The TMS320C30 DSP is a high performance 32 bit floating-point device in the TMS32O family of single-chip DSPs. The 60-ns cycle time of the TM5320C30 allows it to execute operations at a performance rate up to 33 MFLOPS with parallel multiply and ALU operations on both integer and floating-point data in a single cycle. The TMS320C30 real-time performance offer flexible design approach in a variety of applications. At the junior level, students are introduced to the implementation of basic DSP algorithms such as sampling techniques, convolution, correlation, and fast Fourier transforms using the TMS320C30 Evaluation Board. At the senior level, students apply these tools to implement design projects in the areas of control, robotics, or communications.
