ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a historical perspective on high performance embedded computing (HPEC) systems and representative technologies used in their implementations. It describes several hardware and software technologies spanning a wide spectrum of computing platforms. The chapter provides examples of computing systems spanning almost a decade of computing. It reviews these technologies to put in perspective the rapid advancement that HPEC has experienced. This retrospective in HPEC developments, including both hardware systems and software technologies, helps illustrate the progression in computing to meet very demanding defense applications. Reviewing the canonical architecture components will help in understanding the key system capabilities necessary to develop an HPEC system. Several academic and laboratory pioneers began to demonstrate the impact that digital signal processing could have on a broad range of disciplines, such as speech, radar, sonar, imaging, and seismic processing.
