DSPs are helping to make it hard to get lost [Spotlight Report]

Have you heard about the Swedish couple that was trying to find their way to the island of Capri, but ended up about 400 miles away in the northern industrial town of Carpi? Seems they misspelled their destination on their car's global positioning system (GPS). An unfortunate and inconvenient mistake. But it says something about the precision of the technology and how people, and not just the military, have come to rely on GPS. Of course, digital signal processing (DSP) technology is visible in all digital wireless applications, from 4G cellular to MP3 players, HDTV receivers, and personal navigation systems. At the rate that the technology and the market are evolving, most analysts believe signal processing-driven location technologies could be ubiquitous in two or three years. The development of new satellite navigation systems and applications is already opening up new design/ development and market opportunities for the industry.