Digital signal processing requirements for engineers in defence research: research areas for next generation systems

Digital signal processing (DSP) systems used in existing military applications are significantly more powerful than those used in most commercial applications: typical military DSP systems are capable of calculating several hundred million arithmetic operations per second. At least three orders of magnitude increase in computing power are required to maintain a viable system capability in the 1990s, when typical applications will need throughputs approaching one million, million arithmetic operations per second. Increases of this order require simultaneous advances in several of the technology areas that underpin DSP. The author discusses some of the DSP-related problems in these areas and outlines the research effort and engineering skills required to maintain a useful system capability. The author gives a brief history of the development of semiconductor technology and its application to DSP. Future developments to increase the number of arithmetic operations per second are also discussed