DSP real-time operating system coordinates image processing

Because of their high-speed arithmetic, interrupt processing, and I/O facilities, DSPs are a natural for applications that require image capture, control, and processing. In some cases, DSPs are used as controllers in conjunction with specialized imaging ASICs. In other applications, one or more DSPs are used to execute both control and core imaging functions like FFTs, filters, and correlations. The complexity of image processing applications favors a multitasking approach that breaks the interrupt processing, I/O, imaging, host communications and other housekeeping functions into a collection of prioritized tasks. While many programmers still prefer to roll their own real-time multitasking environment, their are a number of advantages to using an off-the-shelf real-time operating system (RTOS) like SPOX. Because of space and performance constraints, DSP designers have traditionally balked at using the advanced facilities available in off-the-shelf real-time operating systems. Spectron has answered this concern by creating a real-time DSP environment that incurs less than 2% of overhead in most applications, and can occupy as little as 2 kwords of memory. And even this incremental impact on performance and memory utilization may be overstated, given that designers will have to recreate many of the facilities provided by SPOX within their applications.