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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (7713)	1/29/1998 11:58:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Jim - 'Are DSP's and ASIC's the same or different?' Probably useful to a lot of people to answer this question so, ... . Digital Signal Processors are normally general purpose devices somewhat like microprocessors except that they are specialized to do certain kinds of operations extremely well. In particular, they are specialized to do the kinds of math that are important to communications applications (e.g. fourier transforms), whereas the microprocessor in your computer is a somewhat more generalized (word processing doesn't require to many multiplies or divides). Think of DSP's as a kind of independent math coprocessor (remember those?). Application Specific IC's on the other hand are a description more of the customer base than the particular product. Anytime someone designs an IC for a very particular application it can be called an ASIC. So, sometimes an ASIC can be a type of DSP, but at other times an ASIC can be an Analog device which in no way could be interpreted as a DSP. From reading the Qualcomm literature, I would guess that they use 'DSP' to refer to the device that does the Code Division spreading and despreading and probably the compression/decompression. Lots of very fancy math happens in those processes. ASIC's in QCOM lingo seem to refer to the chips that do the analog functions (primarily modulation/demodulation.). Hope this helps. Clark