A Project-oriented Master Programme in "DSP Algorithms and ASIC Architectures"

Over the last decade Digital Signal Processing (DSP) has evolved from being a term known by only a few specialists , to a household term. The growth in DSP applied in e.g., consumer, medical, communications, networking and computing devices has been spectacular. In fact, the digital signal processor market has grown 40% per year since 1988 and this gure is expected to continue over the next 10 years. At the same time the extreme improvement in hardware technologies has been paving the way for designing dedicated architectures for realtime execution of still more complex DSP algorithms, continuously decreasing the power and silicon consumption required to perform certain functional-ities. Consequently, we consider advanced DSP topics as being essential in the curriculum for a still growing number of electrical engineering students. These topics are basically related to 1) the design of highly complex DSP algorithms according to given speciications, and 2) realtime implementation of these algorithms using various and conceptually diierent hardware architectures. Aalborg University, which has a long standing tradition for project-oriented teaching in traditional DSP theory at the Master level, therefore in 1994 launched a new Master programme in "DSP Algorithms and ASIC Architectures". Now, after ve years of very successful execution of this programme, we in this paper would like to report on our experiences.