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Advantages of DSP | disadvantages of DSP

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of DSP. It mentions DSP advantages or benefits and DSP disadvantages or drawbacks. DSP stands for Digital Signal Processor or Processing.

What is DSP?

Introduction:
The DSP is a microprocessor chip with optimized architecture to support processing of complex algorithms at high speed in less time. DSP operates on digital signal. Hence all the real world signals and signals to be processed are converted to digital form with the help of ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) before. One the processing is completed the digital signal is converted back to analog form using DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) as per requirements.

DSP inside

The DSP chips are manufactured by many manufacturers, popular among them include TI, CEVA, Analog Devices, ARM, Intel, Freescale, XILINX etc. The different manufacturers have their own hardware architecture and software instructions to support complex algorithms. The figure-1 depicts typical components in a DSP chip. Refer What is DSP>> and DSP Architecture>> for more information.

Benefits or advantages of DSP

Following are the benefits or advantages of DSP:
➨DSP offers very high accuracy. Hence filters designed in DSP have tighter control on output accuarcy compare to analog filters.
➨The digital implementation is cheaper compare to analog counterpart.
➨The reconfiguration is difficult in analog system as entire hardware and its components need to be changed. At the same time, in DSP reconfiguration is very easy and only code or DSP program need to be flashed after changes are incorporated as per requirements.
➨The DSP offers various interface types such as UART, I2C etc. which helps in interfacing other ICs with the DSP.
➨DSP can be interfaced with FPGA. This combo helps in design of protocol stack of entire wireless system such as WiMAX, LTE etc. In this type of architecture few modules are ported on FPGA and few ones on DSP as per latency requirements.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of DSP

Following are the disadvantages of DSP:
➨The use of DSP requires anti-aliasing filter before ADC and re-construction filter after DAC. Moreover it requires ADC and DAC modules. Due to use of this extra components complex of DSP based hardware increases.
➨DSP processes signal at high speed and moreover it consists of higher internal hardware resources. Due to this, DSP dissipates higher power compare to analog signal processing. Analog processing consists of passive components (R, L and C)m which dissipate lower power.
➨The hardware architectures and software instructions of each DSP are different. This requires training on the DSP in order to program for various applications. Hence only highly skilled engineers can only program the device.
➨Most of the DSP chips are very costly and hence one needs to use the appropriate IC as per requirements (hardware,software).



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