This paper describes the application of a commercially available microprocessor (Intel 3000 or Signetics 3000) to a flexible data transmitter and data receiver for high-speed data modems. For the transmitter a quadrature modulation scheme is chosen; the receiver is based on phase-shift compensation techniques and coherent demodulation with an externally derived digital carrier. For the realization with the given microprocessor it has been necessary to adapt the way of executing the various operations (especially the multiplications for the digital filtering) to the available computational capabilities. The resulting microprocessor implementations are also suitable for application in the current medium-speed synchronous data transmission systems.

A digital filter is introduced consisting of a transversal part and a simple recursive network. The coefficients of the transversal part are equal to integer powers of two or zero; thus complicated multipliers are avoided and instead a simple routing circuit is used. Use of several types of the recursive network makes the filter applicable in different frequency ranges. The coefficients of the transversal part can be interpreted as differences of successive values of the impulse response of the filter. It is shown that this difference routing digital filter (DRDF) is especially suited for application in data transmission.

A frequency domain analysis of the digital generation of linearly modulated data waveforms is presented. It is shown that for any rational relation of line carrier frequency and digit frequency, digital data transmitters can be designed economically and adapted to large scale integration (LSI) techniques. Special attention is given to the elimination of digital multipliers throughout the system. The results are illustrated with an example of an all-digital vestigialsideband (VSB) transmitter, with a specially shaped output spectrum which facilitates carrier and clock recovery in the receiver.