The History of DSP and Why No One Mentions DSP Anymore

Jacktang

The History of DSP and Why No One Mentions DSP Anymore [Copy link]

DSP (Digital Signal Processing) is digital signal processing technology, and DSP chip refers to the chip that can realize digital signal processing technology. The DSP chip adopts Harvard structure with separate program and data, has a special hardware multiplier, widely adopts pipeline operation, and provides special DSP instructions, which can be used to quickly implement various digital signal processing algorithms. In today's digital era, DSP has become a basic device in the fields of communications, computers, consumer electronics, etc., and is widely used in digital control and motion control. The main applications include disk drive control, engine control, laser printer control, inkjet printer control, motor control, power system control, robot control, high-precision servo system control, CNC machine tools, etc. The main applications for low-power, handheld devices, and wireless terminals include mobile phones, PDAs, GPS, and data radio stations. Let's first learn about the history of DSP Since the 1960s, with the rapid development of computer and information technology, digital signal processing technology has emerged and developed rapidly. Due to the low processing speed of microprocessors, they cannot meet the high-speed real-time requirements of increasing amounts of information. Therefore, the application of faster and more efficient signal processing methods has become an increasingly urgent social need, giving rise to the birth of DSP chips. In the 1970s, the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of DSP chips had matured. But at that time, DSP was only in textbooks, and even the developed DSP systems were composed of discrete components, and their application areas were limited to the military and aerospace sectors. In 1978, AMI released the world's first single-chip DSP chip S2811, but it did not have the hardware multiplier that modern DSP chips must have; In 1979, Intel released the commercial programmable device 2920, which is a DSP chip, but it still did not have a hardware multiplier; In 1980, Japan's NEC Corporation launched the MPD7720, which was the first commercial DSP chip with a hardware multiplier and was therefore considered the first single-chip DSP device; In 1982, TI successfully launched its first-generation DSP chip, TMS32010, which was a milestone in the history of DSP applications. This DSP device was manufactured using micron-process NMOS technology. Although its power consumption and size were slightly larger, its computing speed was dozens of times faster than that of a microprocessor. The advent of this series of DSP chips marked a major step forward in the DSP application system from large systems to miniaturization. From then on, DSP chips began to be truly widely used. Since the TMS320 series DSP chips are low-priced, easy to use, and powerful, they have gradually become the most influential and successful DSP series processors. In the subsequent development process, the computing speed, integration and application fields of DSP chips have been gradually expanded. After entering the 21st century, the advent of the sixth generation of DSP chips has completely crushed the previous generations of chips in terms of performance. At the same time, many personalized branches have been developed based on different needs, gradually expanding into more new fields. According to statistics from an authoritative information company in the United States, the most widely used DSP chip in the market is the communication field, accounting for 56.1%; followed by the computer field, accounting for 21.16%; consumer electronics and automatic control accounted for 10.69%; military/aviation accounted for 4.59%; instrumentation accounted for 3.5%; industrial control accounted for 3.31%; office automation accounted for 0.65%. The development status of DSP chips At present, there are three major foreign manufacturers of DSP chips: Texas Instruments (TI), Analog Devices (ADI) and Motorola. Among them, TI is the leader, occupying the vast majority of the international market share, while ADI and Motorola also have a certain market. Texas Instruments (TI) TI is the world's most famous DSP chip manufacturer, and its products are also the most widely used. The TMS320 series DSP chips produced by TI are widely used in various fields. At present, TI mainly has three series of products on the market: TMS320C2000, TMS320C5000, and TMS320C6000. The C2000 series now occupies a relatively small market share. Today, the DSP products on TI's official website are mainly C6000 and C5000. TI's three main DSP product series are the C2000 series, which is mainly used for digital control and motion control systems; the C5000 series is mainly used for low-power, portable wireless communication terminal products, among which the TMS320C54x series DSP chips in the C5000 series are widely used in communications and personal consumer electronics; the C6000 series is mainly used in high-performance, multi-functional, and complex communication systems. TI's DSP products are mainly used in machine vision, avionics and defense, size, weight and power consumption (SWAP), audio, video encoding/decoding, and biometrics. Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) ADI also has a certain share in the DSP chip market and has successively launched a series of DSP chips with their own characteristics. Its products are mainly used in speech processing, image processing, process control, measurement and control, and other fields. Its fixed-point DSP chips include ADSP2101/2103/2105, ADSP2111/2115, ADSP2126/2162/2164, ADSP2127/2181, ADSP-BF532 and Blackfin series; its floating-point DSP chips include ADSP21000/21020, ADSP21060/21062, and Tigershark TS101 and TS201S. Motorola Motorola is also the world's largest DSP chip manufacturer, its products include fixed-point and floating-point, dedicated and general-purpose, 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit. DSP chips are mainly used in voice processing, communication, digital cameras, multimedia, control and other fields. The main products include DSP56000 series, DSP56800 series, DSP56800E series, MSC8100 series, DSP56300 series, etc. The above introduces the international leading DSP manufacturers. Now let's talk about the development of DSP chips in China. Although the research on DSP in China started late, the development is not too slow. The 14th and 38th institutes of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation have undertaken the task of developing DSP chips. “Hua Rui 1” In 2012, the 14th Institute cooperated with Loongson and Tsinghua University to develop the domestic DSP chip “Hua Rui 1”, which passed the acceptance of the nuclear high-tech special group. “Hua Rui 1” was successfully applied to more than ten types of radar products of the 14th Institute, creating the “three bests” of domestic multi-core DSP chip product applications at that time: the most radar equipment application models, the largest number of single-set applications, and the largest total number of applications. “Hua Rui 1” is a dedicated DSP chip independently developed by China. The successful development of “Hua Rui 1” fills the gap in my country’s multi-core DSP field, and has guiding significance for improving my country’s independent research and development capabilities of high-end chips, improving my country’s electronic equipment research and development level, and ensuring national information security. “Hua Rui 1” adopts DSP and CPU multi-core architecture design technology in processing system design. Actual measurements show that “Hua Rui 1” has obvious advantages in processing power and energy consumption, and runs multi-task real-time operating system very stably. The overall technical indicators of the chip reach or exceed the level of similar international products. “Soul Core No. 1” In addition, in November 2012, Wu Manqing’s team from the 38th Institute of China Electronics Group successfully developed “Soul Core No. 1”, which is a 32-bit static superscalar processor and belongs to the second stage of DSP development. The chip is based on 55nm manufacturing process and has complete independent intellectual property sovereignty. “Soul Core No. 1” is widely used in the fields of Internet of Things, communications, national defense security and public security. Its successful application has broken the monopoly of foreign high-end digital signal processing chips in China's high-performance computing field. “Soul Core No. 1” has enabled China's radar digital system to have a “Chinese core”, achieving a major breakthrough. "Hua Rui 2" Last year, "Hua Rui 2" passed the acceptance as a high-end chip project of the national "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" major special project of nuclear high-tech. The "Hua Rui 2" DSP chip that passed the acceptance of "Nuclear High-tech" this time is a fully independently designed, marking that my country has once again made a major breakthrough in the field of high-end DSP research and development. The "Hua Rui 2" chip adopts 40 nanometer process and 8-core heterogeneous design. It is specially adapted for anti-stealth algorithms. It has a working frequency of 1GHz, can complete 400 billion floating-point operations per second, supports 64-bit standard double precision, and its comprehensive processing performance is better than that of international mainstream DSP chips. After 4 years of research and development and 2 years of application verification, Huarui 2 has made breakthroughs in more than 10 core technologies such as multi-core heterogeneous architecture, autonomous instruction set, dynamic reconfiguration and vectorized compilation, and obtained more than 40 intellectual property rights such as invention patents, layout design and software copyright. Huarui 2 integrates 4 general-purpose DSP cores and 4 innovative reconfigurable cores to support the acceleration of typical signal processing algorithms. At the same time, for applications with different performance requirements, a series of high-end and mid-range products of "Hua Rui 2" have been formed, which are fully promoted and applied in civil fields such as security monitoring and security computers, and military fields such as radar, communications, and electronic countermeasures. This is also the first time that China has obtained so many patents on high-end chips. In addition, "Hua Rui 2" can also support artificial intelligence computing, with nearly one trillion computing power, which can provide great support for the rise of artificial intelligence. “Soul Core II A” Also last year, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation 38 Institute completed the design of the second-generation product of the “Soul Core” family, “Soul Core II A”, through continuous iteration and running-in of the “Soul Core I” in actual use. "Soul Core II A" adopts a fully autonomous system architecture. By changing single core to multi-core, expanding computing components, upgrading instruction system, expanding storage capacity, increasing data parallelism, enriching debugging methods, and expanding application areas, the device performance is 100 billion floating point operations, while having a relatively good application environment and debugging methods. The single-core performance is 4 times that of similar processing cores in the current international market. It can be directly interconnected with high-speed ADC and DAC, has relevant timing interfaces, and can realize P-band RF direct acquisition software radio processing. As a general-purpose DSP processor, "Soul Core II A" will be widely used in high-density computing fields such as radar, electronic countermeasures, communications, image processing, medical electronics, and industrial robots. At present, it is being promoted and used in a variety of major equipment and image processing fields. Compared with "Soul Core No. 1", the performance of "Soul Core No. 2A" has been improved by 6 times. It only takes 1.6us for a single core to realize 1K point FFT. The computing efficiency is 3 times higher than that of TI's TMS320C6678, and the actual performance is 1.7 times. The Soul Core DSP core is the highest performance DSP core on the market, surpassing the performance indicators of similar products on the market. It has won more than 30 national technical invention patents, software copyrights and other scientific and technological achievements. The launch of "Soul Core II A" has made software radio from an ideal to a reality. People's dream of system functions mainly depending on software algorithms has become possible. At the same time, it has laid a solid foundation for my country to establish an independent high-end DSP product lineage. Future development trend of DSP From the above introduction to DSP, we can find that the development trend of DSP technology is towards system integrated DSP, integrating DSP core, MPU core, peripheral circuit unit, special processing unit and storage unit on one chip. In addition, the future development trend of DSP technology is mainly reflected in the following aspects: (1) More use of super Harvard structures with multi-channel, superscalar, multi-processing, multi-threading, and very long instruction words will occupy a dominant position in the future DSP core structure. (2) Programmable DSPs will gradually replace standard DSPs. Manufacturers can develop different types of products on the same DSP platform to meet the personalized needs of customers. Programmable DSPs also make it easier for users to upgrade their systems. (3) Better performance and faster computing speed are the unchanging trend. (4) Fixed-point DSP will become the mainstream. Floating-point DSP has high computational accuracy and large dynamic range, but it is expensive and consumes a lot of power. Fixed-point DSP devices have low cost, low power consumption, and low memory requirements. Currently, more than 80% of the DSP device market is 16-bit fixed-point programmable DSP devices. (5) FPGA devices can process more channels in conjunction with traditional DSP devices to achieve high-speed real-time processing capabilities to meet the needs of multimedia, wireless communications and other fields. (6) The dual-core platform that combines DSP and microprocessor (MCU) has become a new trend in the development of DSP technology because it can both process data and improve intelligent control. OMAP is a typical example of this dual-core platform, which was released by TI. DSP products have a broad market in my country, and many domestic and foreign manufacturers have begun to deploy in China. The varieties and technologies of DSP chips will develop in the direction of more and more types, low power consumption and high performance. Since the development of DSP technology, many people think that DSP has reached the point of being a hero in the twilight of his career. In reality, Freesacle, ADI, and NXP have stopped the research and development of new technologies. At present, from a large perspective, only TI is left among international companies carrying the banner of DSP. China Electronics Technology Group Corporation has made some explorations and achievements in this regard. In the eyes of many people, in the past decade, the development of ARM and Intel has far exceeded that of DSP. However, in the industrial field, the application of DSP still occupies a very important position. But it is foreseeable that embedding some DSP modules that can realize basic digital signal processing functions into FPGA chips is another major trend in digital circuit design. Some companies have or plan to integrate ASIC-based microprocessors or DSP cores with programmable logic arrays on a single chip. The DSP performance provided by FPGAs has exceeded 128 billion MACs per second, which is much higher than the performance of traditional DSPs currently provided by mainstream suppliers. Among them, Xilinx is the world's leading manufacturer of programmable logic devices. According to test data provided by Xilinx, Xilinx FPGA runs 100 times faster than the fastest DSP in the industry. Therefore, a single FPGA can replace the traditional so-called DSP processor array. Another product with outstanding performance is the QuickDSP series launched by QuickLogic, which provides embedded DSP building blocks and programmable logic flexibility. In addition to the previous programmable logic and storage modules, this new series also includes dedicated multiplication and addition modules. These synthetic modules can realize DSP functions. Therefore, it can be predicted that in the near future, digital systems implemented by a single DSP or FPGA will be replaced by a DSP+FPGA structure or an FPGA design structure embedded with a DSP module.

alan000345

Such a detailed historical introduction is really good, and there are also predictions for the future. I really like it.