IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium

Digital signal processing (DSP) systems perform real-time transformations on time discrete digitised samples of analogue quantities with finite bandwidth and signal to noise ratio. These transformations can be specified in programming languages and executed on a programmable processor or directly on application specific hardware. The choice is determined by tradeoffs between cost, performance, power and flexibility. Hence DSP is a candidate par excellence for hardware-software co-design. In contrast to analogue signal processing, DSP guarantees perfect reproducibility, storage and testability. Signal quality is a matter of exact mathematical operations. The price paid is the cost of hardware and the performance needed to satisfy the hard real-time character of DSP. This problem is now solved by the abundance of digital VLSI technology which provides for cheap storage and high speed computation.• The combination of VLSI technology and DSP has created the break-through of modern consumer electronics (CD, CD-I, DCC, DAB,...), portable and personal communication (GSM, DECT, MSBN,...), broad-band networks (ATM, ADSL,...) and multimedia. These applications ad-dress mass markets which are in very fast evolution as a result of the equally fast evolution of performance and achievable complexity of VLSI storage and computation. DSP based products have a growth rate of 38% per year. On the other hand these products become extremely complex, must be very cheap and have an average market window of 15 months. This causes a number of constraints for the design of these products.