Analog Devices started as a supplier of amplifiers and evolved, adding additional analog signal chain products such as digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters. These devices were a natural lead-in for developing their digital signal processing (DSP) product line. DSPs are specialized processors that excel at the mathematical manipulation of converted analog signal data in the digital domain. They are widely used in audio, imaging, telecommunications, radar/sonar, and similar data-driven applications.

Analog first established itself in the DSP market with the ADSP-2100 family. These are programmable single-chip microcomputers containing computational units, a program sequencer, dual address generator, on-chip data, program memory, serial ports, boot circuitry (for loading on-chip program memory), and enhanced interrupt capabilities. They process 16-bit data directly, provide for multi-precision computation, and support fixed and floating-point numbers. The devices are at the core of many defense, aerospace, medical, and industrial products.

Analog expanded its offerings with several higher-performance DSPs, beginning with the SHARC family in 1994. The SHARC is a Super Harvard Architecture Single-Chip Computer with high-performance floating-point and fixed-point DSP capabilities. It has gained widespread acceptance among designers and excels in applications such as audio processing systems, single-CPU systems, and high-end multi-DSP processing computers.



Analog continued to expand its portfolio with the Blackfin, TigerSHARC, and Quad-SHARC families. The Blackfin targets multimedia, industrial, and telecommunications applications by combining a dual-MAC engine, a clean, orthogonal RISC-like instruction set, and single instruction-multiple data (SIMD) multimedia capabilities. The TigerSHARC offers leading performance density for multiprocessing applications such as motor and power control, process control, security and surveillance, and test and measurement. The Quad-SHARC provides high performance-to-density with a low cost-to-performance ratio and leverages the built-in multiprocessing features of its ADSP-21060 core to achieve 480 peak MFLOPS with a single-chip, single-package solution.