A high performance microprocessor for DSP applications

Currently available single chip programmable DSP processors share a common characteristic - they all include some portion of the system memory on-chip. Even with advanced semiconductor technology, the tradeoff between memory size and processing functionality is not a good one. Both must be severely compromised in order to combine them into a single integrated circuit. These compromises have been a problem for many high performance application areas. This paper describes a new DSP processor which contains no primary on-chip memory. Instead, it is designed to access external memory efficiently. The silicon area saved by excluding the memory is used to add functionality and increase processing throughput significantly beyond that of existing single chip designs.