Architectural considerations of a signal processor under microprogram control
Y. S. Wu · 1971
The application of microprogramming to seismic, acoustic and radar processing is well-known. The system architecture required to address wide bandwidth signal processing problems is of a general form shown in Figure 1. In order to provide the high throughput which is required by digital signal processing, parallelism is generally accepted as the proper design concept for the signal processing arithmetic element. A microprogram processor (or a host processor) could be used to control the arithmetic element which can be either an associative processor, functional memory, parallel ensemble, matrix array processor or a vector processor. The efficient design of the microprogram processor is the key to insure the high duty cycle utilization of the expensive arithmetic element hardware. Parallel architectures fall far short of their expectations because of the control problem associated with keeping all the hardware usefully occupied all the time.