State Design Pattern Implementation of a DSP processor: A case study of TMS5416C

This paper presents an empirical study of the impact of State Design Pattern Implementation on the memory and execution time of popular fixed-point DSP processor from Texas Instruments; TMS320VC5416. Actually, the object-oriented approach is known to introduce a significant performance penalty compared to classical procedural programming. One can find the studies of the object-oriented penalty on the system performance, in terms of execution time and memory overheads in the literature. Since, to the author´s best knowledge the study of the overheads of Design Patterns (DP) in the embedded system programming is not widely published in the literature. The main contribution of the paper is to bring further evidence that embedded system software developers have to consider the memory and the execution time overheads of DPs in their implementations. The results of the experiment show that implementation in C++ with DP increases the memory usage and the execution time but meanwhile these overheads would not prevent embedded system software developers to use DPs.