DSP ICs penetrate into low-cost applications

Digital-signal-processing (DSP) ICs targeted for cost-sensitive applications are emerging in many everyday consumer products such as telephone-answering systems, cellular telephones and talking greeting cards. To keep costs down, designers of the DSP chips have optimized on-chip resources by trimming the arithmetic units to 16 bits or less, integrating the mixed-signal I/O functions to reduce chip count, and adding control capabilities to eliminate off-chip microcontrollers or adding DSP functions to a microcontroller.