Parallel implementation of pulse compression method on a multi-core digital signal processor

Abstract

Pulse compression algorithm is widely used in radar applications. It requires a huge processing power in order to be executed in real time. Therefore, its processing must be distributed along multiple processing units. The present paper proposes a real time platform based on the multi-core digital signal processor (DSP) C6678 from Texas Instruments (TI). The objective of this paper is the optimization of the parallel implementation of pulse compression algorithm over the eight cores of the C6678 DSP. Two parallelization approaches were implemented. The first approach is based on the open multi processing (OpenMP) programming interface, which is a software interface that helps to execute different sections of a program on a multi core processor. The second approach is an optimized method that we have proposed in order to distribute the processing and to synchronize the eight cores of the C6678 DSP. The proposed method gives the best performance. Indeed, a parallel efficiency of 94% was obtained when the eight cores were activated.