The advent of the signal microprocessor

A software-controlled processor for analog signals, called the signal microprocessor (SMP), is described. The SMP is enabled by the high-speed buffer memory technology of acoustic charge transport (ACT) which stores samples of wideband signals as quantities of charge. The signal samples are processed in a massively parallel architecture which uses ultrasound to transport the samples from one processor to the next. In this high-speed computational engine, digitally programmable attenuators serve as multipliers and a summing bus is used as an accumulator. This architecture has demonstrated multiply-and-accumulate rates in excess of 45 billion operations per second. A digitally programmable 128-tap finite impulse response filter is described. This device may be used in each of the basic signal-processing functions of signal generation, extraction, modification, and characterization. Some SMP applications and examples are discussed