原创 The Next 25 Years

Forward an speech from Mike Hames

The Next 25 Years
By Mike HamesTI Senior Vice President
I had the chance this morning, at TI’s fifth annual Developer Conference, to get together with about 1000 engineers who are using TI Digital Signal Processing technology to create unique and exciting electronics products. As you may know, this is the 25th anniversary of the first commercially successful digital signal processing. And as someone who was there at the beginning, I am pleased to join the conference today to talk about where the technology is headed in the next 25 years.

Back in the early 1980’s, DSP was just an idea we were kicking around in TI’s Houston offices. There were about thirty of us, young engineers who truly believed we were on a mission from God to create a new technology that had the potential to change the world. Back then, a DSP was a simple processor with a single multiplier, and you could literally memorize the lines of code. The market was relatively small (zero at first), but our customers developed some amazing products for the telecommunications, military and industrial spaces. I remember one of the markets on our target list was homomorphic processing. Back then, I used to say I had no idea what it was, but I assumed it would make the world safe for democracy.

Today, we’re living in a very different DSP world. Global sales reached 9.5 billion last year, and with products like DaVinci™, we’re integrating DSP, RISC processors and hardware accelerators and peripherals. And we’ve gone from 500 lines of code to a future with potentially hundreds of thousands lines of code.

As I look ahead, I truly believe we are only at the beginning of the DSP evolution. TI customers are creating applications we never imagined back in my Houston days. And as we talk about the Digital Age to come, we imagine 3-D integration and processors so small, they’re virtually invisible. Moreover, at TI, we’re looking at artificial vision, and laying the groundwork for processors that sense their environment and can interact with the end-user. There are even times when we sound as though we’re wandering in the realm of science fiction. But we’ve been there before.

That’s where we first discovered DSP technology and we will continue to forge the future providing you with the most innovative solutions for your unique and exciting applications.