Digital Signal Processor Trends

During the past decade digital signal processors (DSPs) have hit critical mass for high-volume applications (Figure 1). Today, the entire digital wireless industry operates with DSP-enabled handsets and base stations. The mass-storage industry depends on DSPs to produce hard-disk drives and digital versatile disc players. Ever-increasing numbers of digital subscriber line and cable modems, line cards, and other wired telecommunications equipments are based on DSPs. Digital still cameras, hearing aids, motor control, consumer audio gear such as Internet audio are just some of the many mass market applications in which DSPs are routinely found today. More specialized DSP applications include image processing, medical instrumentation, navigation, and guidance. With the growing importance of DSPs and their applications, it seems appropriate to look at the changes occurring in these devices and to hazard a few guesses about where DSP innovations will lead in the opening decades of the new century. The continued growth of DSPenabled applications will depend on developments in several areas of technology: the underlying manufacturing processes, the DSP core and chip architectures, and the software for development and applications. An additional factor, and the most difficult one to anticipate, is innovation. In a few years, designers will be dealing with DSPs that integrate hundreds of millions of on-chip transistors and deliver performance measured in trillions of instructions per second. (See 1999 IEDM short course on system on a chip by author, available for sale at http://shop.ieee.org/store.) Determining how to use that processing power effectively will require imagination that goes beyond conventional engineering methodologies. Why have DSPs done so well in the last few years? The DSP phenomenon is part of the overall microprocessor success story, and it must be seen in that light. Like the high-end reduced instruction set computing (RISC) engines used in computers and the mediumrange RISC microcontrollers in embedded systems, DSPs are becoming increasingly differentiated, designed to handle the processing tasks of specific types of applications. This trend will continue with all microprocessors in the years ahead, and it will be responsible for much of the future success of DSPs.