Hardware control of a real-time multichannel digital signal processing system

SRI International has developed a high-performance parallel signal processing system for use in real-time applications. The system consists of multiple analog input and output (I/O) channels linked by an array of digital signal processing (DSP) elements. System performance requires that multiple output samples, which depend on the input data, be generated immediately following the acquisition of the input samples. Two innovative features of the system are an ensemble of DSP boards, each of which contains eight AT&T DSP32C processors, and a network of multiplexed data paths and scheduling hardware. The latter feature solves the I/O bottleneck problem common to commercial DSP approaches and results in higher data throughput than is possible with run-time software scheduling. Planned improvements to the design are discussed.<
>