Two of this year’s major signal processing developments come together with the announcement by Spectron Microsystems Inc, Santa Barbara, California that it will support the freely-available Signal Computing System Architecture announced by Parsippany, New Jersey-based Dialogic Corp in March (CI No 2,120) with its new SPOX signal processing operating system announced last month (CI No 2,289). Microsoft Corp also announced that it has joined forces with Spectron to bring Windows into the Dialogic architecture. The Signal Computing System Architecture is an open architecture for building multimedia information processing and delivery systems using multiple technologies; Spectron says that by supporting SPOX on systems compliant with the Dialogic architecture, independent software vendors will not need to worry about the signal processor being used. Spectron hopes that its move will make SPOX the standard operating system for use in things such as call processing systems, compression, speech synthesis and recognition, facsimile and data modems, and suggests that up to now, the lack of a common operating system for signal processors has meant that developers had to write proprietary code that would run their algorithms only on a particular manufacturer’s signal processing chip. The first Signal Computing System Architecture product to use the SPOX operating system, code named Antares, will be introduced by Dialogic in first quarter 1994, and will support algorithms from multiple independent suppliers of signal computing technologies. Under the agreement with Microsoft, host-based Windows software will be combined with the SPOX operating system. The aim is that Windows applications should be able to exploit any signal processor present. The software developed by Microsoft will include a signal processing resource manager and an application programming interface.
