• 2006-09-13 : Version 3.3.1 has been released
• 2005-07-13 : Version 3.3 has been released
• 2005-03-15 : DSP Gateway 3.2 has been merged into linux-omap tree

DSP stands for Digital Signal Processor. Unlike general purpose processors (GPP) such as Intel Pentium, DSP's have only a primitive set of functions. However, a DSP can operate faster and more efficiently than GPP processors when it comes to executing specific kinds of calculations/tasks. As a consequence, DSP's are widely adopted especially in embedded systems today.

The typical applications that can benefit from DSP are media players, in which each DSP task can be a decoder, e.g. MP3 decoder or MPEG4 decoder.

Texas Instrument's OMAP processor (e.g. 1510 chip) is composed of an general purpose processor (GPP, e.g. ARM925T) and a DSP processor (e.g. TMS320C55x). "DSP Gateway" is software that enables data transmission on the TI's OMAP processors between the GPP processor - running Linux - and the DSP.

Currently, the newest version of DSP Gateway supports OMAP1510, 1610, 1710, and 5912.

Using DSP Gateway, Linux applications can communicate with DSP tasks through device files.

You can create many tasks on the DSP side and each DSP task is accessible through a corresponding device file from the Linux application.

The device files are generated automatically when the DSP tasks are loaded.