Digital Signal Processors (DSPs)
- Powerful special purpose 8/16/32 bit microprocessors designed specifically to meet the computational demands and power constraints of today’s embedded audio, video, and communications applications.
- Digital Signal Processors are 2 to 3 times faster than the general purpose microprocessors in signal processing applications.
- DSPs implement algorithms in hardware which speeds up the execution whereas general purpose processors implement the algorithm in firmware and the speed of execution depends primarily on the clock for the processors.
- DSP can be viewed as a microchip designed for performing high speed computational operations for “addition”,“subtraction”,“multiplication” and “division”.
- A typical Digital Signal Processor incorporates the following key units.
- Program Memory.
- Data Memory.
- Computational Engine.
- I/O Unit Audio video signal processing, telecommunication and multimedia applications are typical examples where DSP is employed.
