Processing speech with the multi-serial signal processor

The Multi-Serial Signal Processor (MSSP), a custom bit-serial multiprocessor for signal processing, has been designed and built for application to real-time speech processing. The MSSP is intended to be particularly efficient and well-suited for channel-organized algorithms such as filterbanks, with one or more channels running on each processing element. The particular algorithms that motivated the design of this machine are computational models of hearing, for use in a speech recognizer front-end. An unusual optimizing compiler is used to convert fairly conventional sequential instructions for a channel into efficient microcode that concurrently executes the several stages and many channels of the models.