Guest Editorial: New Frontiers in Signal Processing Applications and Embedded Processing Technologies

Signal processing technologies increasingly pervade and enable a very large and expanding range of applications including wireless communications, smart cameras, ‘big data’ analytics systems and many many more. The variety of architectural, algorithmic and design technologies required for their realisation pose a challenging problem to designers of these systems, necessitating consideration of, for instance, computer arithmetic, baseband signal processing for next-generation wireless communications, advanced programmable multicore and heterogeneous processing architectures and programming approaches. This issue includes leading works in each of these areas in exposition of the sheer breadth of design requirements for application-specific embedded signal processing. A strong theme of achieving high-performance and efficient baseband signal processing architectures is evident in two papers. In “3.2 Gbps Channel-Adaptive Configurable MIMO Detector for Multi-Mode Wireless Communication” (10.1007/s11265-015-1093-2) the authors present a run-time adaptive detector approach for multiple-input, multiple-output wireless communications so fundamental to 4G and 5G communications standards such as LongTerm Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced. This work demonstrates the key role that adaptivity plays in ensuring