Archives:Breakout: The 1990s

Abstract 

The 1990s may be remembered as the decade the human race made its greatest strides toward interconnection. Signal processing played an important part in this advance. It is not surprising that, after decades of steady growth and the cultivation of niche markets, signal processing achieved something of a breakout in the 1990s. In 1985 there were only three large commercial markets for DSP chips-speech coding, video compression, and modems-which, together, were a $50..million business. The growth of these three applications and the appearance of many new ones, such as cellular phones, sound boards, hard-disk drives, scientific instruments, and robotics resulted in a DSP business totaling $2.2 billion in 1995, as programmable and function-specific DSP achieved large markets.  This article charts the growth of DSP in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Citation and Link to Full Article

Frederik Nebeker, "Breakout: The 1990s," in Signal Processing: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1948-1998 (Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 1998), 139-161. 

Breakout: The 1990s (pdf)