Digital Signal Processing - Implementation

Implementation

Depending on the requirements of the application, digital signal processing tasks can be implemented on general purpose computers (e.g. supercomputers, mainframe computers, or personal computers) or with embedded processors that may or may not include specialized microprocessors called digital signal processors.

Often when the processing requirement is not real-time, processing is economically done with an existing general-purpose computer and the signal data (either input or output) exists in data files. This is essentially no different than any other data processing, except DSP mathematical techniques (such as the FFT) are used, and the sampled data is usually assumed to be uniformly sampled in time or space. For example: processing digital photographs with software such as Photoshop.

However, when the application requirement is real-time, DSP is often implemented using specialised microprocessors such as the DSP56000, the TMS320, or the SHARC. These often process data using fixed-point arithmetic, though some more powerful versions use floating point arithmetic. For faster applications FPGAs might be used. Beginning in 2007, multicore implementations of DSPs have started to emerge from companies including Freescale and Stream Processors, Inc. For faster applications with vast usage, ASICs might be designed specifically. For slow applications, a traditional slower processor such as a microcontroller may be adequate. Also a growing number of DSP applications are now being implemented on Embedded Systems using powerful PCs with a Multi-core processor.