NI-DSP SRM for LabVIEW for Windows 1-1 Part 4: NI-DSP Interface Utilities
Chapter 1Introduction to the NI-DSP Interface Utilities

This chapter contains an overview of the NI-DSP Interface Utilities, installation instructions, and explains how to
use the NI-DSP Interface Utilities. You should familiarize yourself with the material in this chapter before
beginning subsequent chapters in this part.
The National Instruments AT-DSP2200, a high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) plug-in board for the
PC, is based on the AT&T WE DSP32C 32-bit, floating-point, digital signal processor. With the NI-DSP
Interface Utilities, you can customize the DSP Library that resides on the board by adding or deleting functions to
and from the common object file format (COFF) file that constitutes the onboard-resident software. This COFF
file is made of the Kernel, memory management routines, execution control routines, data communication
routines, interrupt handling routines for data acquisition, and a set of more than 60 analysis functions. Throughout
the chapters in this part, the COFF file is referred to as the DSP Library. By customizing the DSP Library, you
can change the number of analysis functions that are included. The other parts of the DSP Library always remain
unchanged.
Note: To customize the DSP Library that resides on the board, you need to have the Developer ToolKit,
available through National Instruments, which contains an AT&T C compiler, assembler, linker, and
documentation.

Overview of the NI-DSP Interface Utilities

The NI-DSP Interface Utilities are on the NI-DSP for LabVIEW for Windows distribution disks.
Unless otherwise stated, all references to directories in this part of the manual are to subdirectories under the path
you specified during installation of the NI-DSP Interface Utilities. If you chose the path D:\DEVEL, then the
installer will create the directory DEVEL and copy all files and directories to it. Figure 1-1 shows directory
structure created by SETUP.
D:\DEVEL
ExamplesDispatch Lib
Figure 1-1. NI-DSP for DOS Directory Structure
The Dispatch directory contains the utilities necessary for creating a custom DSP Library dispatcher. The
Dispatch directory contains the Dispatch application and the files NIDSP.fnc, dispatch.s., and
NIESSEN.fnc.
Dispatch is a PC application that uses the files NIDSP.fnc and NIESSEN.fnc and generates the
WE DSP32C assembly code needed to properly dispatch to a custom DSP Library based on the grouped function
names.