DSP: The challenges ahead

So far, we’ve looked at the positive aspects of DSP.

But, technology, however good, is not without its share of challenges, whether

it is the technology itself or it is the implementation. Let’s take a look at

some of the issues that the DSP industry is facing.

In our discussions with people from the DSP industry, the one common problem

that they all cited was making Digital Signal Processors as easy and friendly to

program as the general-purpose microprocessor. Making DSP easier to use,

increasing comfort levels with DSP and making available off the shelf software

will make DSP take off in a big way. Right now, DSP technology intimidates most

people as it is considered to be for absolute techies.

So, the next challenge is to grow the install base of software programmers by

several orders of magnitude. This, I’m sure, sounds like music to most

programmers out there. Like we mentioned in our career

article on DSP, all it takes is very good knowledge of assembly level

programming and C. For that matter, even C++ appears to be used nowadays but the

bottom line is assembly level programming. And, most DSP programmers swear by

it. So what are the qualities that a DSP engineer needs to have?

Profile of a DSP engineer

A DSP person needs to understand signal processing algorithms, real time

programming and time constraints. Unlike C or Java developers who have ample

resources at their disposal, a DSP engineer has to keep in mind system

constraints like limited memory and processor speeds for real time applications.

Taking the example of a C program itself, even if the program takes a second

longer to run, it doesn’t pose a problem. But, a DSP programmer cannot afford

to take such liberties. To maintain the quality of service, signals need to

processed and delivered in real time, imagine you’re talking on the cell phone

and the other person hears what you are saying after a delay. So one has to have

the ability to develop DSP

applications with limited resources.

Hardware

Coming back to the challenges, from the hardware point of view, the big

question is how to extract more processing power, add more features and at the

same time lower the costs. With fall in prices, hitherto unthought of

applications are suddenly being made possible. With the increasing number of

applications and complexity, processing power is one thing that you can’t have

too much of. The answer to this problem could be that one needs to develop more

innovative architecture, by which we can push the envelope on performance.

Another challenge is reducing the power consumption and thereby increasing the

battery life. Here again architectural schemes need to be thought out by which

power consumption can be further reduced. For example, certain blocks can be

switched off when not in use or circuit design techniques can be improved upon

to reduce power consumption. Here power becomes another area that has to be kept

in mind for optimization.