Anatomy Of Sound Blaster Family Of Audio Cards; Digital Sound Processor Chip - Creative SB0350 Programming Manual

1-2 Hardware Overview
Anatomy of Sound Blaster Family of Audio
Cards
This section describes the major building blocks of the Sound Blaster family of audio
cards. The functionalities and features of the following components will be
presented:

Digital Sound Processor Chip

The Digital Sound Processor chip is one of the most important components on the
Sound Blaster card. It interprets the DSP commands and then carries out one of the
following tasks:
Digital Sound Processor (DSP) chip
Mixer chip
FM Synthesizer chip
Bus Interface chip
Advanced Signal Processor
Performs 8/16 bit Mono/Stereo digitized sound recording and playback
Performs 4:1, 3:1 and 2:1 ADPCM decompression in Sound Blaster mode
Control the sampling rate
Interprets Sound Blaster compatible MIDI and MPU-401 UART mode
commands (Sound Blaster 16 only)
Provides communication path between Host and the Advanced Signal
Processor (Sound Blaster 16 Advanced Signal Processing only)
Provides the Advanced Signal Processor's code downloading (Sound
Blaster 16 Advanced Signal Processing only)
Provides DAC speaker control
Controls various modes of DMA transfer