The Wild Historical Tug-a-War: “DSP Theory versus IC Technology”

Many engineers believe that the publication in 1975 of Rabiner and Gold’s reference book “Theory and Application of Digital Signal Processing” and Oppenheim and Schafer’s text book “Digital Signal Processing” marked the beginning of modern digital signal processing as a formal academic discipline. The 20 years preceding the publication of these pioneering texts were marked with many key developments, including the digital filter, the fast Fourier Transform, the microprocessor, the digital calculator, the digital watch, etc. The first portion of this talk will describe how many of these early developments contributed to the development of the field of digital signal processing as a formal engineering discipline, and how DSP theory and IC technology “pulled and tugged” at each other and pushed the state of the art in both areas to great heights. The second part of this will focus on recent developments in area of adaptive signal processing. During the last fifty years rapid advancements in adaptive signal processing theory and IC technologies have greatly advanced the state of the art in DSP associated with telephone communications, computer networking, digital video, wireless communications, and digital multimedia information systems.