Digital signal processor

A Digital Signal Processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor designed specifically for digital signal processing. DSPs can also be used to perform general-purpose computation, but they are not optimised for this function.

Instead, they are usually optimised for:

• multiply-add operations
• deep pipelining
• DMA processing

Most DSPs are fixed-point DSPs. However, floating point DSPs are common for more demanding applications.

Related terms:

• DSK
• Digital Signal Processing