Digital signal processor interrupt accelerator
AssigneeKoninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
InventorCarl J. Knudsen
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A circuit arrangement reduces the number of interrupts to a DSP required to transfer digital samples between external I/O devices and a data memory, thus allowing the DSP to perform additional sample processing operations. An interrupt accelerator responds to I/O interrupts from an I/O device by pausing the DSP, transferring samples with the data memory, and tracking the number of samples transferred. When a predetermined number of samples have been transferred, the interrupt accelerator interrupts the DSP to perform a block transfer of samples in conjunction with sample processing.
Claims21
A circuit arrangement for use in executing a digital signal processor (DSP) program to process digital signal data, the circuit arrangement comprising:
- a data memory configured to store digital signal data comprised of samples;
- a DSP coupled to the data memory and configured to process samples stored in the data memory;
- an I/O interface configured to generate an I/O interrupt;
- and
- an interrupt accelerator configured to detect the I/O interrupt from the I/O interface, to transfer a sample between the I/O interface and the data memory in response thereto, and to interrupt the DSP after a predetermined number of samples are transferred between the I/O interface and the data memory.
A circuit arrangement for digital signal processing of audio samples, the circuit arrangement comprising:
- a data memory configured to store digital signal data comprised of audio samples;
- a digital signal processor (DSP) coupled to the data memory and configured to process audio samples stored in the memory;
- an input interface configured to generate I/O interrupts;
- an output interface configured to generate I/O interrupts;
- and
- an interrupt accelerator configured to transfer audio samples from the input interface to the data memory in response to an I/O interrupt from the input interface, to transfer audio samples from the data memory to the output interface in response to an I/O interrupt from the output interface, and to interrupt the DSP after a predetermined number of audio samples are either transferred from the input interface to the data memory or from the data memory to the output interface.
A method of transferring samples between a data memory and an I/O interface, a digital signal processor (DSP) accessing the data memory for processing the samples, the method comprising:
- detecting an I/O interrupt from the I/O interface;
- transferring samples between the I/O interface and the data memory in response thereto;
- and
- interrupting the DSP after a predetermined number of samples are transferred between the I/O interface and the data memory.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.