Overview - Digital Design of Signal Processing Systems: A Practical Approach - page 2

Figure 1.1 VLSI technology plays a critical role in realizing real-time signal processing systems
Broadband wireless access technology, processing many megabits of information per second, is
another impressive display of the technology, enabling mobility to almost all the services currently
running on desktop computers. The technology is also at work in spacecraft and satellites in space
imaging applications.
The technology is finding uses in biomedical equipment, examples being digital production of
radiographic and ultrasound images, and implantable devices such as the cardioverter defibrillator
that acquires and digitizes heartbeats, detects any rhythmic abnormalities and symptoms of sudden
cardiac arrest and applies an electric shock to help a failing heart.
This chapter selects a mobile communication system as an example to explain the design
partitioning issues. It highlights that digital design is effective for mapping structured algorithms in
silicon. The chapter also considers the design of a backplane of a high-end router to reveal the
versatility of the techniques covered in this topic to solve problems in related areas where
performance is of prime importance.
The design process has to explore competing design objectives: speed, area, power, timing and so
on. There are several mathematical transformations to help with this. Keeping in perspective the
defined requirement specifications, transformations are applied that trade off less relevant design
objectives against the other more important objectives. That said, for complex design problems these
mathematical transformations are of less help, so an effective approach requires learning several