When my partners and I founded BDTI back in the early 90’s, “DSP” was in the process of becoming both a hot technology and a widely used abbreviation. The abbreviation meant two distinct things: digital signal processing, and digital signal processor. You could usually figure out which one was meant by the context, but in some ways they were interchangeable—if you were doing digital signal processing, you were probably doing it on a digital signal processor.
Today, DSP (in both senses) is ubiquitous. It’s tough to find an embedded system that doesn’t do some type of digital signal processing, and it’s tough to find an embedded processor that doesn’t have DSP-oriented architectural features. In a sense, all processors have to be “DSPs” now. You’d think the DSP abbreviation would be everywhere—but instead, it seems to be losing its cachet.
The major “DSP processor” companies like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices don’t use the abbreviation as much as they once did; in recent years their press releases talk more about “video processors” or “multimedia chips” or “convergence processors” (all of which do digital signal processing, of course). We rarely see software houses advertising their “DSP” software components any more; they market things like audio post-processing algorithms instead. These days it’s not uncommon for us to find ourselves explaining that, yes, video processing for surveillance applications does come under the umbrella of DSP, or that our “DSP” benchmarks are relevant to multimedia applications.
Signal processing applications have become so diverse, and the DSP portions so tightly interwoven with the non-DSP portions, that the whole industry is shifting to more of an application focus. We’re seeing the “DSP industry” splinter into many sub-industries, each with unique (and diverse) requirements for both hardware and software.
So while in our early days BDTI focused on “DSP processors” and worked with a relatively limited scope of chips and software, we now find ourselves working with a very broad swath of technologies, in terms of chips, algorithms, systems, and tools. I’m sure the same can be said for any company involved in signal processing—even those that don’t necessarily consider themselves “DSP” companies.
We expect that, as DSP is used more widely for more purposes and in more products, the term itself will become less and less common. Twenty years from now “DSP” may well be passé—but DSP functionality will be anything but.
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