The beauty of digital signal processing is that it enables people to convert available processing power into cool new features, better performance, and lower power in their products. There are countless examples, including MP3 players, wireless communications of all kinds, medical imaging, and voice recognition.
Microcontrollers historically haven’t had enough processing power to do much DSP, but that’s changing—today’s high-end microcontrollers offer DSP performance levels that were once the exclusive purview of dedicated DSP processors. In addition, microcontrollers are both ubiquitous and cheap. This combination means that we can expect a huge wave of new DSP-enabled functionality implemented on microcontrollers in a vast range of applications.
This creates a big opportunity for MCU vendors, who can differentiate their products in the brutally competitive MCU space by providing better DSP capabilities in their chips and in their application development infrastructure. It’s also a big opportunity for system vendors, who can differentiate their products based on new DSP-oriented capabilities. More DSP horsepower is potentially good for everyone.
The trick to making this all work is to make it VERY easy for system developers—who may know little about DSP and don’t have time to learn—to incorporate DSP features into their system designs. Not only do they need tools and methodologies to make DSP functionality easy to add, they need these tools to generate efficient results. MCU applications are too price- and power-sensitive to tolerate sloppy, wasteful implementations.
High-end MCUs already have pretty good DSP performance; right now it’s really the tools and methodologies that are the limiting factors.
Part of what’s needed is just basic blocking and tackling, like having really good C compilers. But part of it, I think, is some out-of-the-box thinking about new approaches. How about a graphical programming environment like Labview? Or multimedia frameworks that support a wide range of codecs and related functionality (e.g., audio recording and playback) in a robust, plug-and-play fashion?
Make it easy for non-DSP system designers to implement DSP, and who knows what kind of cool features will start showing up in our cars and appliances.
Jennifer Eyre White of BDTI contributed to this column.
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