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DSP 4 You:
Whether you think it means digital signal processing, or digital signal processor, DSP is a topic that affects your life, if not your work as a software engineer.

Since 1979 saw the design of the first wave of user-programmable DSP chips—the Intel 2920, the NEC µPD7720, and the Bell Labs (AT&T) DSP-1—2004 is a 25th anniversary that’s appropriately celebrated with the collection of articles presented in this month’s ACM Queue.

by Richard F. Lyon | April 16, 2004

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Of Processors and Processing:
There’s more than one way to DSP

Digital signal processing is a stealth technology. It is the core enabling technology in everything from your cellphone to the Mars Rover. It goes much further than just enabling a one-time breakthrough product. It provides ever-increasing capability; compare the performance gains made by dial-up modems with the recent performance gains of DSL and cable modems. Remarkably, digital signal processing has become ubiquitous with little fanfare, and most of its users are not even aware of what it is.

by Gene Frantz, Ray Simar | April 16, 2004

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On Mapping Alogrithms to DSP Architectures:
Knowledge of both the algorithm and target architecture is crucial.

Our complex world is characterized by representation, transmission, and storage of information - and information is mostly processed in digital form. With the advent of DSPs (digital signal processors), engineers are able to implement complex algorithms with relative ease. Today we find DSPs all around us - in cars, digital cameras, MP3 and DVD players, modems, and so forth. Their widespread use and deployment in complex systems has triggered a revolution in DSP architectures, which in turn has enabled engineers to implement algorithms of ever-increasing complexity.

by Homayoun Shahri | April 16, 2004

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DSPs: Back to the Future:
To understand where DSPs are headed, we must look at where they’ve come from.

From the dawn of the DSP (digital signal processor), an old quote still echoes: "Oh, no! We’ll have to use state-of-the-art 5µm NMOS!" The speaker’s name is lost in the fog of history, as are many things from the ancient days of 5µm chip design. This quote refers to the first Bell Labs DSP whose mask set in fact underwent a 10 percent linear lithographic shrink to 4.5µm NMOS (N-channel metal oxide semiconductor) channel length and taped out in late 1979 with an aggressive full-custom circuit design.

by W. Patrick Hays | April 16, 2004

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Stream Processors: Progammability and Efficiency:
Will this new kid on the block muscle out ASIC and DSP?

Many signal processing applications require both efficiency and programmability. Baseband signal processing in 3G cellular base stations, for example, requires hundreds of GOPS (giga, or billions, of operations per second) with a power budget of a few watts, an efficiency of about 100 GOPS/W (GOPS per watt), or 10 pJ/op (picoJoules per operation). At the same time programmability is needed to follow evolving standards, to support multiple air interfaces, and to dynamically provision processing resources over different air interfaces. Digital television, surveillance video processing, automated optical inspection, and mobile cameras, camcorders, and 3G cellular handsets have similar needs.

by William J. Dally, Ujval J. Kapasi, Brucek Khailany, Jung Ho Ahn, Abhishek Das | April 16, 2004

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