Market Background

Just as business managers rely upon spreadsheets and office workers have word processing software, scientists and engineers need personal productivity software. They need software that gets a variety of day-to-day jobs done by working the way they do. Unlike business managers who deal with relatively finite sets of data, technical users often perform multiple complex operations on large quantities of data. They develop theories, gather data from experiments testing theories and then analyze and visually manipulate the data to determine the validity of their theories. This "scientific method" way of thinking is common for engineers and scientists across a broad spectrum of disciplines -- from those designing airplane landing systems to chemists developing drugs, or doctors conducting medical research.

Technical Productivity Software Need

The goal of this process may not be a specific number, but an observed or measured condition that is a model of the real world. The ultimate answer can be found in a visual, graphical rendering of a mass of data values which could show, for example, speech patterns as waveforms, the relative "crashworthiness" of stress-tested automobile components, blood pressure and volume measurements indicating a healthy or diseased heart, the volatility of new gasoline additives, the frequency of defective products on an assembly line, the accuracy of an airplane's instrument landing system, or the precision of a digital-to-analog converter in a compact disk player. Because of the interactive nature of this type of analysis, technical users need productivity software at the desktop.

The Business Spreadsheet

For lack of alternatives, many technical users have turned to financial spreadsheets or technical applications software for data manipulation and calculation. But spreadsheets are designed for displaying numbers in rows and columns to produce numerical results that may be graphed. Alternatively, technical applications software is developed and tuned to perform a highly specific task.

While powerful, these standalone packages don't meet the productivity needs of the typical scientist or engineer in the same way Excel serves the MBA. Scientists and engineers require software tools that allow data manipulation, calculation and visualization of extremely large datasets. Multiple graphical views enable scientists and engineers to quickly examine and compare complex relationships between sets of data and perform "what if" analyses and simulations.

The DADiSP^® Solution

DADiSP (Data Analysis and Display), developed by DSP Development Corporation of Newton, MA, is the first software package to meet the need for standard, general purpose productivity software for a broad range of technical applications. Through a sophisticated integration of powerful computational and analytical capabilities with interactive graphic display, DADiSP "speaks" the language of scientists and engineers who use computers to get work done. DADiSP combines the simplicity of a menu-driven graphical environment that's consistent across different hardware platforms with the power, extensive configurability, and flexibility required by demanding applications and "power users."

With DADiSP, a user can bring in data from a wide variety of sources including various CSV, text, industry specific file formats or directly from many common data measurement or acquisition devices. Users can perform small tasks as well, by manually keying data into a data table. The data is manipulated in multiple, dynamic "windows" that display data sets either graphically or as numeric tables. Using the wide range of mathematical, statistical, engineering or customized functions available in DADiSP, application specific analysis is performed on one or more views to produce graphical results. The user is free to view and manipulate data and produce output in the format needed for the application.

There may be up to 100 windows on screen at once, with the ability to zoom in or out, scroll and overlay graphs as needed. In addition, any change in one window causes all dependent windows to recalculate and update. In all cases, the user can interact with the data visually through the keyboard or mouse.

DADiSP possesses the high degree of software engineering standards required by technical computing applications. By providing user-definable menus, macros and command files, DADiSP meets the critical need in the scientific and engineering community to customize the solution to meet the specific need of each application.

Combining market-proven power, a consistent user interface, flexibility, extendibility, broad hardware support and a design attuned to the needs of the technical users, DADiSP is the general purpose personal productivity software package that scientists and engineers need.

A Rapidly Growing Market

This type of personal productivity software requires greater computing capacity now delivered by high-performance PCs and laptops. These machines are rapidly increasing in power and decreasing in price to the point where it is becoming feasible for many technical organizations to have supercomputer like processing on every engineer's desktop.

"DADiSP is exactly the type of general purpose software that the technical professional has been looking for. It is the Excel for scientists and engineers," said Randy Race, Chief Technical Officer of DSP Development Corporation. "DADiSP represents a very cost effective solution for managers who wish to maximize the productivity of their technical personnel."

"High performance PCs and notebooks have penetrated the technical computing market in the same way that PCs and tablets have reached nearly every business desktop. DADiSP is uniquely poised to fulfill the demand for technical productivity software at the desktop for the next generation of science and engineering professionals," Race said.

DSP Development has more than 25 years experience serving scientists and engineers in laboratory automation, data acquisition, process control, image processing, digital signal processing, computer-aided engineering and other fields. DADiSP users include organizations such as Uniroyal Goodrich Tire, NASA, General Electric, General Motors, Massachusetts General Hospital, Teledyne, the Naval Underwater Systems Center, Stanford Research and MIT Lincoln Laboratories. DADiSP runs on Windows based PCs as well as many UNIX based workstations.