of Microprocessors

hardware based development has slowed way down from, say, the late 80s and
early 90s. Mostly this is due to the great and increasing capital resources needed
to develop a new hardware-based synthesizer or signal processor. Custom VLSI,
which has always been very costly to develop, is several-fold higher now than it
was 10 years ago. Much of that is the far higher cost for .25 micron and under
masks compared to 1.5 and 2.0 micron then. But a large part also is competing
against cell phone, Internet equipment, and PC manufacturers for chip
manufacture in the thousands when they are demanding it in the millions. Aside
from chips, the regulatory burden is higher now and tooling costs for PC boards
and enclosures are up.
Often the synth manufacturer is now forced to use components that are great for
cell phones or PCs but are less than optimal for synths. So it's really tough and
getting tougher to design and build keyboards, racks, signal processors and other
hardware based gear.
Now consider the relative ease of developing software synthesis and signal
processing applications running under a general purpose OS. Unless you're out to
solve the world's problems, most all of the infrastructure - like sample reading and
writing, buffering, A-to-D and D-to-A conversion, and GUI elements - is already
there and adequately functional. One merely needs to dig up the documentation
and start coding away on the core algorithms of interest. And even that is much
easier now with high-speed floating-point hardware being a standard part of the
processor. With floating-point arithmetic, programming in C becomes nearly as
effective as assembly language. No longer is highly specialized knowledge of the
mathematical properties of binary arithmetic necessary to get a good performing
DSP algorithm running.
Producing software has always been much easier than hardware, and with the
Internet, it is getting easier.
The net result is greatly increased accessibility and democratization.
With so many "brains" working on software synthesis and other DSP applications,
a lot of good stuff (along with plenty of junk too) is coming out now. I am
especially amazed at the progress heard at last year's NAMM show in real-time
software-based time/pitch shifting.
The future? There will always be hardware and low-end mass-market synths and
digital pianos will continue to use custom chips and small microcontrollers
running highly optimized dedicated software. As one moves up, there will be
increasing use of standard DSP chips in place of custom VLSI and generalpurpose
processors controlling them. The high-end "hardware" synth of 5-10
years from now may be little more than PC hardware plus a really good audio
interface packaged in a typical keyboard enclosure. The casual user will never
realize this however.