DSP : Digital Signal Processor
Most probably, many people will think DSP as deputy superintendent police. But in embedded world, DSP is one of those highly revered word and it is short form for digital signal processor. And also, for many electronics engineering students, it must have been one of those dreaded subjects, depending on which portion one sits in a class room. For people like us, who just scrapped through maths and electronics, it was topic to avoid.
But why DSP is so important today ? A simple statement may prepare you to appreciate power and importance of DSP, a simple DSP could be faster and more powerful than latest most famous general purpose chip P-IV at 3.8GHz! and while DSP might work at miserly 32MHz with as little as 50mA and 5V DC!
Well, I am not here to write about DSP or its design, I wanted only to write significance and importance of DSP in our life! It will not be an exaggeration if we say that cellular phones will not have existed if DSP was not there! What does DSP do in a cellular phone ? It digitizes speech, compresses it, transmit through RF while it is receiving similar speech data in compressed from, and then play it back through tiny speaker of cellular phone after decompressing it, all in real time! Cellular phones does lot many things now days! Just imagine what is the compression of speech in cellular phones ? To put in simple English, it needs only 46KB of memory to store 1 minute of speech! Compare that with much hyped MP3! These are all possible thanks to DSP!
Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Motorola, Lucent technologies are few companies who manufacture DSPs. DSP will nor replace general purpose CHIP, as DSPs are used for performing specific task at fastest way possible while consuming least power.
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Tags: analog devices, cdma, cellular phone, chip, Digital Signal Processor, DSP, gsm, intel, lucent, mobile phone, motorola, mp3, speech compression, texas instruments, ti
August 25th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Nice information on DSP… thanks…