This paper presents the employment of modern design and development tools, on the design and implementation of contemporary and complex signal processing systems. This approach aims to provide an alternative point of view in designing and teaching state of the art systems with at-hand demonstration using real-life laboratory equipment. Specifically, the design and implementation of two composite projects, namely an OFDM transceiver and a Signature Verification system are shown. The design and implementation tools used for the latter projects are the TMS320C6713 DSK development kit from ‘Texas Instrument Inc’. in conjunction with Matlab – Simulink from ‘Mathworks Inc’.