A digital signal controller (DSC) can be thought of as a hybrid of microcontrollers and DSP processors. Like microcontrollers, DSCs have fast interrupt responses, offer control-oriented peripherals like PWMs and watchdog timers, and are programmed in C. On the DSP side, they incorporate features found on most DSPs such as single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) units, barrel shifters, and large accumulators. It should be noted that not all vendors have adopted the term DSC. The term was first introduced by Microchip Technology in 2002 with the launch of their 6000 series DSCs and subsequently adopted by most, but not all DSC vendors. For example, Infineon and Renesas refer to their DSCs as microcontrollers.) DSCs are used in a wide range of applications, but the majority go into motor control, power conversion, and sensor processing applications. Currently DSCs are being marketed as “green” technologies for their potential to reduce power consumption in electric motors and power supplies. In order of market share, the top three DSC vendors are Texas Instruments, Freescale, and Microchip Technology, according to market research firm Forward Concepts (2007). These three companies dominate the DSC market, with other vendors such as Infineon and Renesas taking a smaller slice of the pie. DSC like microcontrollers and DSPs require software support. There is a growing number of software packages that offer the features required by both a DSP application and a microcontroller application. With a broader set of requirements software solutions are more rare. They require: development tools, DSP libraries, optimization for DSP processing, fast interrupt handling, multi-threading and a tiny footprint. The most notable example is the DSPnano RTOS. The Microchip dsPIC solution is most rounded and details can be found at [1].
