A programmable voice processor for fighter aircraft applications

A flexible, high-speed digital voice processor has been designed for use in conjunction with the JTIDS communication terminal to be installed for testing on board F-15 fighter aircraft and in Army JTIDS installations. The processor, known as the Advanced Linear Predictive Microprocessor (ALPCM), has an architecture which is similar to that of its predecessor but contains significant improvements in speed, memory, and software development aids. The design includes an arithmetic section (four AMD 2901C bit-slice RALUs and an AMD 29517 16x16 multiplier), a doubly pipelined control path, and an I/O section based on a finite state machine implementation. Microcode development is enhanced by the presence of an interactive debugging system consisting of a plug-in monitor board controlled from a host computer. The ALPCM is capable of implementing conventional 2400-bps LPC vocoders in real time and is sufficiently powerful to accommodate more sophisticated, computationally intensive algorithms should the extra performance they provide be required in the severe F-15 operational environment.