MIT and two other research universities have received $1 million grants from Texas Instruments (TI) to establish a collaborative research network in advanced digital signal processing (DSP).
The other members of the DSP Leadership Universities Program are Rice University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Each institution will receive $1 million over three years. Professor Alan V. Oppenheim of electrical engineering and computer science, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, will oversee the project at MIT.
"The importance and impact of digital signal processing is clearly growing dramatically because of exciting new algorithms and devices as well as an expanding array of applications," Professor Oppenheim said.
TI Vice President Bob Hewes, director of the firm's Digital Signal Processing Solutions Research and Development Center, said the Dallas company was "seeking to develop a unique synergy among leading DSP researchers, accelerating progress in areas of DSP applications and algorithm development."
DSP chips are the engines driving the digitization of electronics. They are the key components of such products as digital cell phones, voice recognition systems, intelligent telephones, network switches, imaging and vision systems, medical electronics, digital audio, and sonar and radar operations. More powerful than CPUs (central processing units) of computers in handling math-intensive tasks, DSP chips are also found in antilock brakes and global positioning systems.
A version of this article appeared in the April 28, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 28).
