Industry Expert Blogs

Only last week, in Are General Purpose Microprocessors Over? I wrote about how general purpose processors are never going to get any faster and so the system architecture of the future will consist of a general purpose processor (probably multicore) along with a number of special purpose processors. A lot of those special purpose processors will be digital signal processors (DSPs) of one sort or another.

Another driver of the importance of DSPs is that the world is analog. Historically, this has meant complex analog interfaces. However, in a modern process, analog designs don't shrink much, if at all, or may simply be impossible to design. But digital gates and DSPs halve in area each process node, and so the balance of power shifts in favor of handling signals with only the minimum amount of analog and doing everything else in the digital domain with DSPs.