Multiple digital signal processor environment for intelligent signal processing

We describe a novel, expandable, multiple digital signal processor (DSP) architecture with a symbolic processing host. A multiprocessor board, called Odyssey, based on this architecture has been developed to combine symbolic and real-time digital signal processing in a single computing environment. Some of the key features of the board are: 20 million multiply/accumulates per second, 512K bytes of data space, and expandability to 16 boards on a NuBus host. The DSPs used are the TMS32020 signal processing chips developed by Texas Instruments, and the host is Texas Instruments' Explorer, a LISP machine workstation. This provides environment to perform many intelligent signal processing tasks by associating meaningful relationships between quantitative (signal processing) and qualitative (symbolic processing) entities to develop inferences using expert system technology. Applications such as grammar-driven connected speech recognition, neural network simulation, EEG analysis, and generation of speech from general English text with natural language processing are some of the tasks that can utilize the computational power of the multiple DSP and/or the associated symbolic processing capabilities. Software development tools to implement applications include the device driver to facilitate communication between the host processor and the Odyssey board, a unique window-based debugger resident on the Explorer that allows for simultaneous state display of all the processors on the board, a FORTH interpreter for high-level language programming, and a cross-assembler/linker for assembly level programming.