At the Consumer Electronics Show last month I was struck (not for the first time) by the number of consumer electronics products that rely on digital signal processing—at this point, nearly all of them. In fact, so many of today's products incorporate digital signal processing-based functions that it's tempting to start viewing these functions as commodities.
But in most cases, DSP functions aren't going to become commodities anytime soon. They may be ubiquitous, but they're not interchangeable. For one thing, there can be substantial differences in the signal quality produced by different implementations of a given function, and in some cases, these differences are readily perceived by typical users, not just by hard-core techies. In one digital TV demo at the conference, it was pretty easy for me to see the difference between TVs with a really good deinterlacing algorithm and those without; in cell phones, you can hear which products are using high-quality noise suppression and which aren't.
Like DSP algorithms, DSP hardware isn't on the verge of commoditization, either. Fixed-function hardware has its place, but a more flexible solution is often required. In many applications, DSP chips must support multiple standards-based algorithms for things like compression, plus proprietary algorithms for things like post-processing—which means that programmability and flexibility are important. At the same time, chip vendors are pressured to meet demanding performance, cost, and power targets. Juggling these conflicting demands requires creativity from chip vendors, and offers plenty of opportunities for meaningful differentiation in hardware and development tools. Even for a specific class of product, like set-top boxes, there's room (and demand) for different hardware solutions that make different trade-offs. Not everyone wants the same thing from their set-top box.
Algorithm and hardware choices often have a profound impact on the final product—in terms of the quality of the user’s experience, cost, energy efficiency, and how quickly the thing gets to market. That's why companies continue to develop new DSP algorithms and refine older ones, and chip vendors continue to roll out different architectures. So don't expect DSP algorithms or chips to become commodities any time soon.
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