LabVIEW DSP - A Hands-on DSP Educational Platform

Digital signal processing technology has transformed our way of life. It has become a fundamental building block in the biomedical, automotive, aerospace, communications and entertainment industries just to mention a few. Ironically, while these systems require interfacing with real world signals, operate in real-time and dynamically interact and present useful information, the pedagogical methods are largely simulation based, off-line processing and static. This paper presents LabVIEW as an educational DSP platform that allows professors to teach and students to learn DSP and advanced concepts by interfacing hardware to live signals, leverage graphical data flow (block diagram) programming to develop and encapsulate signal processing concepts and engage students to interact and develop DSP-based systems by abstracting inherent complexities of low level programming without restricting them. Successful academic case studies of LabVIEW as a DSP platform for real-time FPGA audio processing and multimedia communications are presented.