Digital Signal Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.11.
Photograph of the measurement setup. In the background is the
microcontroller which drives the memory bus of the prototype.
6.7
Overview and future work
As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, cost efficiency is one of the
driving forces behind the integration of cmos circuits. Thanks to the ever in-
creasing speed and density of on-chip transistor devices, the power of digital
integrated systems soon achieved a critical mass which allowed digital process-
ing to actively participate in a domain which until then had been exclusively
reserved for analog circuits: the world of wireless communication. Until that
moment, all of the signal processing was performed in the analog domain, with
the contribution of the digital back-end being limited to some dedicated mixed-
signal blocks such as the pll or the symbol-to-bit demapper in the rear of the
receive chain. The arise of digital signal processing into the field of wireless
communication introduced some major changes in the way both analog and
digital information is being transferred over the analog wireless channel.
The role of digital signal processing
First of all, signal processing allows to deal with analog information in the
same way as is done for digital data. Before being transmitted over the chan-
nel, analog information is translated to the digital domain. The advantage of
