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With
the world becoming smaller and smaller day-by-day, communication seems to be one
of the most sought after technical sector. This revolution is centered on a core
called the Digital Signal Processing (DSP). This explosive growth is by fuelled
by the proliferation of DSP applications such as Highspeed networking/switching/routing,
Voice/Fax Modems, Broadband, Wireless, Digital Imaging and Video. New killer applications
are constantly evolving in the DSP space. The
term "DSP" applies broadly to continuous mathematical processes attempted
in real-time. These include functions such as Digital Filtering (FIR and IIR),
Viterbi Decoder, Convolution, Correlation, Fast Fourier Transforms etc. Most of
these functions require the incoming data to be multiplied or added with various
internal feedback mechanisms to perform the desired
mathematical function.
This function is generically called Multiply/Accumulate. To increase performance,
most general-purpose DSP processors perform a multiply/accumulate function in
a single clock cycle (or less). The hardware to perform this function is called
a multiply/Accumulator (MAC). Most DSP processors have a fixed-point MAC while
some have a more expensive floating-point MAC.
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