Heterogeneous digital signal processing systems for sonar

Current operational UK sonars use processors with throughputs in excess of five hundred million arithmetic operations per second. Several orders of magnitude increase in computing power are required to maintain long range surveillance capabilities in the 1990s and, within the next decade, typical applications will need throughputs approaching one million, million arithmetic operations per second, significantly greater than that currently achieved with fifth generation computers. This paper discusses some of the problems in realising systems with this level of performance