Digital Signal Processors:

A digital signal processor (DSP) is specialized microprocessor specifically designed for real-time digital signal processing. The first DSP generated by Texas Instruments (TI), the TMS32010 in the year of 1983. It has separate instruction and data memory. It has a special instruction set, with instructions such as load-and-accumulate or multiply-and-accumulate. It can work on 16-bit numbers and needed 390ns for a multiply-add operation. Now TI is the market leader in general purpose DSPs. The TMS320 series can be programmed by using high-level languages C, C++, and/or low-level assembly language. The processor is available in various different variants, some with floating point arithmetic and some with fixed-point arithmetic. The floating point DSP TMS320C3x, that exploits delayed branch logic, has as many as three delay slots. The flexibility of this line of processors has led to it being utilized not merely as a co-processor for digital signal processing but also as a main CPU.