Very fast signal processors as a result of the coupling of surface acoustic wave and digital technologies

The recent progress of the digital and the surface acoustic wave (SAW) technologies have made them compatible; and it is now possible to design signal-processing modules which benefit from the flexibility of the digital techniques and the very high computation speed of the SAW techniques. Very fast signal processors can now be built which are able to process several tens of megasamples per second and whose volume and power consumption are limited. This paper shows the compatibility of these technologies and the advantages yielded by their joint use. Several examples are described which relate to one- and two-dimensional Fourier and correlation processors.