What is the development trend of DSP digital signal processor?

DSP digital signal processor is a processor composed of large-scale or very large-scale integrated circuit chips, which is used to complete a certain signal processing task. It is gradually developed to meet the needs of high-speed real-time signal processing tasks. With the development of integrated circuit technology and digital signal processing algorithm, the implementation method of digital signal processor is also changing, and the processing function is constantly improved and expanded.

Integration and programmability are the development trend of DSP digital signal processor chip.

Reducing the size of DSP has always been the development trend of technology. At present, DSP chips mostly use RISC architecture. With the introduction of new technology, more and more manufacturers begin to improve DSP cores, and integrate multiple DSP cores, MPU cores and peripheral circuits into one chip, realizing system level integrated circuits.

With the need of personalized development, DSP programmability provides manufacturers with more flexibility. Manufacturers can develop more series products with different model characteristics on the same DSP chip, which also makes users have replacement needs for the upgrading of DSP, such as refrigerators and washing machines. These home appliances with microcontrollers have now been replaced by programmable DSP for high-power motor control.

At present, among the DSP devices sold in the market, 16 bit fixed-point programmable DSP devices still occupy the mainstream. With the continuous reduction of the cost of DSP fixed-point computing devices, the advantage of smaller and smaller energy consumption is becoming increasingly obvious. In the future, fixed-point DSP chips will still be the protagonist of the market.

Of course, not only DSP chips have programmable characteristics, but also FPGA chips have programmable characteristics.

FPGA is called field editable gate array. It is a semi customized circuit in the field of application specific integrated circuits (ASIC). It not only solves the shortcomings of customized circuits, but also overcomes the shortcomings of the limited number of programmable devices.

With the FPGA chip, we can program a newly invented CPU core and embed it into the FPGA chip. We will analyze this kind of chip in detail later.

Under the requirements of emphasizing flexibility and versatility of structure and dealing with complex algorithms, DSP and FPGA are often combined, using dsp+fpga structure, or embedding DSP module into FPGA chip, which is also a trend of future design.