Digital Signal Processing

DSP, or Digital Signal Processing, as the term suggests, is the processing of signals by digital means. A signal in this context can mean a number of different things. A signal here means an electrical signal carried by a wire or telephone line, or perhaps by a radio wave. More generally, however, a signal is a stream of information representing anything from stock prices to data from a remote-sensing satellite.
Analog and digital signals
In many cases, the signal is initially in the form of an analog electrical voltage or current, produced for example by a microphone or some other type of transducer. In some situations the data is already in digital form - such as the output from the readout system of a CD (compact disc) player. An analog signal must be converted into digital (i.e. numerical) form before DSP techniques can be applied. An analog electrical voltage signal, for example, can be digitized using an integrated electronic circuit (IC) device called an analog-to-digital converter or ADC. This generates a digital output in the form of a binary number whose value represents the electrical voltage input to the device.

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