Digital Signal Controllers Migrate To General-Purpose Processors

Jan. 12, 2006

No longer wallflowers, digital signal controllers (DSCs) are getting much more play these days. This class, which tends to be 16-bit, integer digitial signal processors, initially targeted applications like motor control, soft modems, and power conversion

William G. Wong

Many newer designs incorporate general-purpose processor features. Therefore, a single chip can handle signal-processing applications as well as conventional embedded applications, such as network communications. One example is Microchip's dsPIC line (see ?One 16-Bit Architecture To Bind Them All,? Oct. 13, 2005, p. 56, ED Online 11142) .

It's not surprising that DSCs are being used in applications that don't necessarily exploit the signal-processing features, given the chip's performance and general-purpose features. Likewise, these same architectures are now showing up as general-pupose processors that may lack features such as hardware multiply or multiply-accumulate instructions. These processors are typically less expensive and use less power, but they provide an upgrade path to a full DSC. They're going to give existing 16-bit architectures a run for their money.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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