Author Spotlight: Introducing Arm Education Media’s Newest Textbook on Digital Signal Processing

Arm Education Media concluded a successful 2018 with the publication of our newest textbook, Digital Signal Processing using Arm® Cortex®-M based Microcontrollers: Theory and Practice.

This is the second title in our textbook publishing program, which is aimed at students, professionals and hobbyists looking to learn more about the world of embedded systems, microcontrollers and coding. We caught up with the authors to take an in-depth look at the textbook, and we also discussed the importance of digital signal processing as a subject, as well as the direction of electronic engineering education.

About the Authors

Dr. Cem Ünsalan

Dr. Cem Ünsalan has worked on signal and image processing for 18 years. After receiving a Ph.D. degree from The Ohio State University, USA in 2003, he began working at Yeditepe University, Turkey. He now works at Marmara University, Turkey. He has been teaching microprocessor and digital signal processing courses for 10 years. He has published 20 articles in refereed journals. He has published five international books and holds one patent.

Mr. M. Erkin Yücel

Mr. M. Erkin Yücel received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Yeditepe University. He is pursuing a Ph.D. degree on embedded systems at the same university. He has guided microprocessor and digital signal processing laboratory sessions for three years. Currently, he is working in research and development in industry.

Mr. H. Deniz Gürhan

Mr. H. Deniz Gürhan received his B.Sc. degree from Yeditepe University. He is pursuing a Ph.D. degree on embedded systems at the same university. For six years, he has been guiding microprocessor and digital signal processing laboratory sessions. He has published books internationally on microcontrollers.

The Interview

Why did you choose to write a textbook on Digital Signal Processing?

Digital signal processing has been used in all parts of our lives due to the evolution of digital systems and powerful microcontrollers. There are excellent textbooks on the theory of digital signal processing. We believe that a reader can grasp these theoretical concepts better by implementing them on microcontrollers. Therefore, we wrote such a book to serve the digital signal processing community, students, and all interested hobbyists.

What practical skills and knowledge can students obtain by using your textbook?

By using our book, students can gain a broad understanding of DSP concepts by implementing them on Arm Cortex-M based microcontrollers. More specifically, they will be able to implement DSP algorithms in C language for real-time applications on Arm Cortex-M4 microcontrollers.

How can faculty benefit from using your textbook in teaching their Digital Signal Processing courses?

In our book, we aimed to cover DSP concepts both from theoretical and practical perspectives. Hence, the faculty adopting our book can use it in explaining theoretical concepts in classroom as well as their implementation in laboratory sessions. Since theory and practice is covered synchronously in our book, faculty can easily switch from theory to practice and practice to theory in the offered course. 

What are the features of the Cortex-M4 core that make it particularly useful to Digital Signal Processing?

• Arm Cortex-M4 based microcontrollers have three fundamental advantages for digital signal processing implementation. These are as follows.
• Arm Cortex-M4 based microcontrollers have floating-point unit (FPU). Fundamental DSP operations as multiply and accumulate (MAC), subtraction, division, and square root on floating-point numbers can be realized easily by using FPU.
• Arm Cortex-M4 based microcontrollers have specific single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions. These provide a fairly good advantage for DSP operations not requiring high precision.
• Arm Cortex-M4 based microcontrollers support Arm CMSIS-DSP functions. By using these, fundamental DSP operations such as convolution, correlation, filtering, FFT calculations, interpolation-decimation,fixed point-floating point data conversion, and complex data processing can be implemented in optimized form. Hence, they provide the speed advantage in implementation.

How did you and your co-authors divide the writing duties for the (DSP?) textbook?

Prof. Dr. Cem Ünsalan focused on the theoretical concepts in the book. Meanwhile, Mr. Gürhan and Mr. Yücel focused on more labor-intensive implementation issues such as applications and C codes. As we prepared the draft version of the book, we checked all written sections and implemented applications together. Hence, each author was able to comment on all book sections and implementations. As a result, we were able to unify the pedagogy of the book.

Finally, what are the trends in electronic engineering education that are having an influence on the way you teach?

We can summarize our teaching methodology by the phrase “learning by doing.” Arduino opened up the way to simplify microcontroller usage through students and hobbyists with diverse background. Now, it is time to implement fundamental electronic engineering concepts (such as digital signal processing, digital control, and digital image processing) on more powerful microcontrollers. As a result, a student or hobbyist can use them in solving real-life problems.

Find out more about the textbook

Academics: please email us at edumedia@arm.com and we can provide you with an eBook copy of the textbook for evaluation purposes.

Students and Individuals: Take advantage of our 15% discount on the electronic version of the DSP textbook, which is available until 28th February 2019.

To claim your 15% discount on the DSP eBook, follow these three easy steps:

1. Visit the DSP textbook page by clicking on the button below.
2. Select purchase or subscribe by clicking your preferred option link under “Access”.
3. Follow the instructions to register with “Cleeng,” our e-commerce portal.

Fill out the details on the checkout page. In the Redeem Code field, enter the voucher details AEM1218.

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