Trends in Digital Signal Processors

To facilitate the implementation of complex signal processing algorithms, future DSPs will be required to deliver higher performance and ease-of-programmability without compromising power dissipation and code density. To meet these conflicting requirements, several architectures have been proposed such as EPIC, VLIW, and Superscalar. In this paper, we chart the evolution of DSPs--starting from a simple Multiply-Accumulate engine and progressing to a system-on-a-chip embodying some variant of a parallel processing machine.