W. Patrick Hays
Abstract
From the dawn of the DSP (digital signal processor), an old quote still echoes: "Oh, no! We’ll have to use state-of-the-art 5µm NMOS!" The speaker’s name is lost in the fog of history, as are many things from the ancient days of 5µm chip design. This quote refers to the first Bell Labs DSP whose mask set in fact underwent a 10 percent linear lithographic shrink to 4.5µm NMOS (N-channel metal oxide semiconductor) channel length and taped out in late 1979 with an aggressive full-custom circuit design. The designer I quoted had realized that the best technology of the time would be required to meet the performance demands of the then cutting-edge digital Touch-Tone receiver.
- 1. ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers XXII, February 1979.Google Scholar
- 2. ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers XXIII, February 1980.Google Scholar
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- 5. Input samples are memory based rather than from I/O registers because they are reused cyclically.Google Scholar
- 6. Howard Aiken, a WWII computer pioneer, classified processors according to the number of buses used. According to this classification, DSPs aren't "modified" Harvard architectures. They are, in fact, "Class III" Aiken machines.Google Scholar
- 7. How do you pack over 130 instructions into 16 bits? With numerous special registers.Google Scholar
- 8. The next-generation 'C64xx restored multiply-accumulates.Google Scholar
- 9. Speech recognition isn't included in the tally of the worst-case load because it's an offline function.Google Scholar
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- 11. Yoshida, J. TI and UB Video get a jump on H.264 decoding. EE Times (December 2, 2002); http: //www.eetimes.com/semi/news/OEG20021202S0048.Google Scholar
- 12. Hennessy, J. L., and Patterson, D. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Appendix C. Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco: CA, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 13. See reference 4.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- DSPs: Back to the Future: To understand where DSPs are headed, we must look at where they’ve come from.
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