The use of a microprocessor specifically designed to process data of the form usually required in signal processing applications. The DSP processor, or DSP chip, was developed to meet the operational requirements for processing large amounts of data at the speeds required for speech, audio, telecommunication, and video processing systems. These chips are characterized by short word length, fast CPUs, and on-chip ADCs and DACs, a Harvard architecture, on-chip ROM and RAM for storing filter coefficients and data, extensive pipelining, dedicated hardware multipliers, but limited program memory. Second-generation DSP architectures have removed on-chip data acquisition equipment, increased program memory space, and accelerated arithmetic operations.