User`s guide

3 Working with Signals
3-14
•“Importing Signals” on page 3-62
•“Exporting Signals” on page 3-72
•“Viewing Signals” on page 3-80
Benefits of Frame-Based Processing
Frame-based processing is an established method of accelerating both
real-time systems and simulations.
Accelerating Real-Time Systems
Framed-based data is a common format in real-time systems. Data acquisition
hardware often operates by accumulating a large number of signal samples at
a high rate, and propagating these samples to the real-time system as a block
of data. This maximizes the efficiency of the system by distributing the fixed
process overhead across many samples; the “fast” data acquisition is suspended
by “slow” interrupt processes after each frame is acquired, rather than after
each individual sample.
The figure below illustrates how throughput is increased by frame-based data
acquisition. The thin blocks each represent the time elapsed during acquisition
of a sample. The thicker blocks each represent the time elapsed during the
interrupt service routine (ISR) that reads the data from the hardware.
In this example, the frame-based operation acquires a frame of 16 samples
between each ISR. The frame-based throughput rate is therefore many times
higher than the sample-based alternative.