PERSONAL INSTRUMENT (PI) - A PC-BASED SIGNAL PROCESSING SYSTEM.

The Personal Computer (PC) technology has seen an enormous growth in the last two years. The PC is likely to be limited for computation-intensive tasks such as telecommunications and improved human-factors I/O. At the same time, there has been another evolving technology - VLSI realization of general-purpose signal processors (SP) which are capable of boosting the performance levels of standard PCs by almost two orders of magnitude. With SPs in PCs, we now see tremendous opportunities for distributing computation-intensive tasks away from high-performance mainframe computers; previously formidable tasks such as speech coding and recognition, pattern and scene analysis, spectral analysis, high bit-rate communication, and the like are now all computable by utilizing a single VLSI module embedded in any standard personal computer. A signal processing subsystem with real-time data acquistion and control capabilities has been developed for the IBM PC and is the topic of this paper.