Prior to the advent of stand-alone digital signal processor (DSP) chips, early digital signal processing applications were typically implemented using bit-slice chips. The AMD 2901 bit-slice chip with its family of components was a very popular choice. There were reference designs from AMD, but very often the specifics of a particular design were application specific. These bit slice architectures would sometimes include a peripheral multiplier chip. Examples of these multipliers were a series from TRW including the TDC1008 and TDC1010, some of which included an accumulator, providing the requisite multiply–accumulate (MAC) function.