A customer recently asked me if there was an easy way to truncate the bottom LSBs of the data in a SigmaDSP so it could easily be output via the serial port to a DSP or DAC with a lower bit depth. In particular, the goal was to get the 28-bit data from the SigmaDSP core and output it on the serial port as 16-bit data. Luckily, on the 3rd generation SigmaDSP cores, it is easy to do this using the bitwise logic operators in the Basic DSP - Bitwise library in the Toolbox.
I use a test input that makes use of all of all bits of precision in the core. I then route that to the bitwise AND function and and it with a -1 in 20.8 format, which gives you 0b1111111111111111111100000000... in other words, the bottom 8 bits are zero, and the remaining bits are ones. This lets the MSBs pass through while the LSBs are set to zero.
You can see that my test input is 0x9E147B, and the result of the operation is 0x9E1400. So, this shows that the bottom 8 bits are effectively set to zero.
This, of course, works with negative numbers as well.
