Evolution of VLSI signal processing circuits

Signal processing applications are differentiated from general-purpose data processing in that the computation is organized around a sequence of operations that operate on essentially infinite streams of data (the signal). The large amounts of data (megabytes/minute for high quality speech, gigabytes/minute for video signals) require that the computation be completed in real time or at the same rate that the signal data is required. Though the dominant computation for many algorithms is multiply/accumulate, as algorithms become more sophisticated the decision-making and logical operations are becoming more important. The various approaches developed to perform frequency-selective filtering and the implementation of more sophisticated analog and digital signal processors are discussed in this context