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Newton, Mass.--Nov. 4, 2002--DSP Development Corp. has announced DADiSP/2002, the newest release of the engineering spreadsheet designed specifically for technical data analysis.
DADiSP/2002 now supports external Worksheet Documents or .DWK files (DADiSP Worksheet File). DWK files are single-file, standalone worksheets that adhere to the Compound Document file format. DWK files can be e-mailed and viewed by anyone running DADiSP/2002, and standard Web browsers can access DADiSP Worksheets directly from the Internet. Because DADiSP/2002 functions as a full ActiveX Document Server, any ActiveX Container application such as Excel or Word can embed, manipulate, save, and print DADiSP Worksheets.
DADiSP/2002 adds several data transfer methods to an extensive Automation Server environment. DADiSP/2002's dual-COM automation support allows both interpreted languages such as Visual Basic and compiled languages like C/C++ to make efficient use of DADiSP as an extremely powerful data-analysis engine. Any application supporting Automation can seamlessly connect to DADiSP via standard ActiveX protocols to gain access to over 1000 fast and efficient data-analysis routines. DADiSP/2002 also functions as an Automation Client, allowing COM-based Automation Servers to be incorporated into the DADiSP environment via SPL, DADiSP's Series Processing Language.
DADiSP/2002 employs a "just in time" optimized memory management scheme to make the most of system memory when processing large or small data sets. Large series are transparently buffered to and from the disk, and in-memory buffers are tailored specifically to the result of the calculation at hand. The maximum buffer size can be customized to take advantage of today's large memory systems. Calculations involving smaller series automatically compress to conserve total memory space. JIT memory management combined with code optimization has resulted in speed improvements of up to 100% for many core signal-processing functions.
DADiSP/2002 extends DADiSP's Series Processing Language, SPL, to provide variable function arguments, ternary conditional statements, user-defined error handlers, and optimized loop processing. SPL's C/C++ syntax offers a familiar and clean programming style that enables users to create custom functions and procedures using standard programming techniques. DADiSP/2002 includes over 100 new built-in and SPL routines spanning the areas of matrix and series manipulation, signal processing, math, color, series generation, curve fitting, and statistics.
"DADiSP/2002 now offers over 1000 analysis routines with an intuitive and familiar user interface to provide one of the most comprehensive technical data-analysis tools available today," said Randy Race, DSP's Chief Technical Officer. "DADiSP is used by thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide as a high-productivity alternative to traditional spreadsheet, FORTRAN, C/C++, and Matlab programming."
DADiSP/2002 for Windows 9x/2000/NT/XP is priced at $1995.00, and includes 90 days of technical support.
DADiSP/2002 is now available for general release.
A free DADiSP Worksheet Browser and 30-day Full Product License are available at www.dadisp.com.
DADiSP/2002 Top Ten Features
List of New Functions
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When you get through all the technical discussion in the press release, what it all boils down to is this—what Adobe Acrobat has established for print documents, DADiSP/2002 has set as its model and goal for technical worksheets. For example, an engineer uses DADiSP/2002 to set up a multi-window analysis of some signals of interest, and sends that document to a colleague. That person, even though he doesn't personally own a copy of DADiSP/2002, can double-click on the file icon in the e-mail attachment and examine the analysis worksheet. The recipient can do so because his machine has a copy of a freely distributed DADiSP Worksheet Browser (analogous to Acrobat Reader, which is likewise distributed free of charge). Or by clicking on a link on a Web page, you can automatically load the browser on your system and likewise view someone else's signal-analysis worksheet.
But when I say "technical worksheet," what exactly do I mean? To find out, first back up a moment for a bit of background information because I believe that many readers might not be fully aware of DSP Development Corp. or its flagship product, DADiSP. This package is actually very well established with a history that goes back into the DOS era. When it first came on the scene in 1986, it was indeed revolutionary, and even today has few direct competitors. DADiSP gave scientists and engineers an entirely new way to work with signals. It borrowed the concept of a spreadsheet, where cells are related to each other by user-defined formulas, except in DADiSP each worksheet "cell" is a complete signal. In one "cell," better described as a window, you might have the source signal; a second window might show the FFT of the original signal, a third might apply a digital filter and show the results. This approach is especially attractive to those technical users who have no desire to learn a programming
language. "Most of our customers would never want to deal with conventional programming. They don't care about pointers and those sorts of things," comments CTO Randy Race, who originated the concept back in the company's early days.
Even though DADiSP now has an installed base of more than 100,000 active users, the company and its product have a relatively modest market presence. Race freely admits that his firm has been focused primarily on the technology so that marketing has suffered. Well, a better balance between development and marketing appears to be in the offing with this new release, the first in two years.
Why so long for the upgrade? To achieve all the benefits described in the press release, especially to allow the package to support the features of an Active Document Server, the designers had to virtually redo the code base. One unexpected benefit was a considerable increase in speed, so much so that it surprised even Race. Consider the following benchmark. To calculate and plot a 128K point (131.074 points) FFT on a 233 MHz Pentium machine with 128K bytes of RAM, the previous version required 2.25 seconds, whereas the new version takes off a full second, coming in at 1.25 s. This is because of the retooling of the internal memory-allocation code as well as recoding and optimizing the core algorithms such as those used for frequency-domain transformations and convolutions. Because the FFT is a core routine, functions such as convolution, filtering, correlation, Z transform evaluation, and others experience a similar increase in performance.
Returning to the browser, the company is distributing it free of charge. And it's not just a tool for examining somebody else's work. You can use it as a somewhat stripped-down version of the full product. It limits you to 9 windows and 32K points per series/waveform, which is actually quite a bit of power, and should handle many quick-and-dirty analysis tasks. Note, though, that the browser has no limitations when viewing someone else's worksheet.
With this tool, you can now embed a DADiSP worksheet in an Excel or Word document—in fact, in any program that serves as an ActiveX Container application. Further, you can use DADiSP as an analysis plug-in for other programs where it integrates seamlessly and looks like part of the host application. The company is discussing ways to create such tight integration with products from National Instruments and Agilent (not VEE, comments Race).
The company is also talking with Dataq Instruments, whose hardware device drivers are ActiveX compliant. In this scenario, DADiSP would serve as the primary application, with Dataq products acting as a data source. In fact, if DADiSP has one major shortcoming, it is the limited way in which it imports real-time experimental data. It provides considerable flexibility in reading data files, but streaming data from an experiment into the package isn't always easy, and you have limited choices of hardware with which you can work. But as the number of hardware vendors supporting COM-style drivers increases, this limitation will become less severe.
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