The article, "QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core," which appeared in the June 2012 edition of InsideDSP, showcased Qualcomm’s decision to open up access to its DSP core via a software development kit.

Within a technical article published in the August 2012 edition of InsideDSP, I wrote:

In my December column, I wrote about how smartphones and tablets are subsuming some categories of consumer electronics, such as MP3 players and networked home audio players. Because smartphones and tablets are network-centric devices, their growing use as media players is contributing to another important trend: multimedia content is increasingly being delivered on-demand via the Internet.

Mobile phones are rapidly and dramatically expanding beyond their historical usage as voice-only communications devices, adding a variety of wireless data-fed text, email, web browsing and other functions, supplementing (and in many cases supplanting) the facilities of dedicated still and video cameras, and serving as portable multimedia playback platforms. But all of these functions consume power, and both users and designers of mobile phones are very concerned about battery life.

The October issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine includes an interesting article titled "Could Supercomputing Turn to Signal Processors (Again)?" which discusses the viability of developing supercomputers using digital signal processors.

Touch-free gesture interfaces are increasingly entering the public consciousness, spurred on by trendsetting popular implementations such as Microsoft's Kinect. And, as Tom Cruise's portrayal of Chief John Anderton in the future-forecasting film Minority Report suggests, they're equally compelling beyond the game console. Camera (i.e. image sensor)-based gesture interface implementations may be most common nowadays, but they're not the only feasible approach.

In my October column, I explored the phenomenon of mobile application processors (the brains of smartphones and tablets) competing against more traditional types of embedded processors for use in embedded systems.

Semiconductor memory is increasing in capacity and cost-effectiveness all the time. Yet, there are plenty of deeply embedded applications for which every spare byte of RAM or flash memory is a precious commodity, especially those leveraging memory integrated onto an SOC of processor, rather than external discrete memory. Throw in a performance-constrained processor (intentionally speed-limited to minimize power consumption), a small battery, and a multi-day battery life requirement, and you've got a challenging design on your hands.

In last month's edition of InsideDSP, Jeff Bier's editorial discussed the advantages of (and potential issues with) designing an embedded system around an application processor originally developed for smartphones, tablets, and other high volume devices. To wit, at the beginning of his writeup, Bier mentioned that Texas Instruments had recently stated its intentions to de-emphasize application processors for smartphones and tablets, instead refocusing its OMAP ARM-based SoCs on embedded applications.

In reading the InsideDSP newsletter every month, one observation that I hope you've made is that a diversity of processing options exist for implementing digital signal processing algorithms. The alternatives include GPUs, FPGAs, conventional CPUs, and standalone DSPs, along with DSP cores embedded alongside CPUs and other function blocks in highly integrated SoCs.