Abstract: Development of conventional sonar takes a great deal of efforts and has a low reliability due to the involvement of various special-purpose hardware and software. Design of digital sonar using general signal processing platform (GSPP), on the other hand, provides a way to solve these problems in the future. The design consideration, hardware and software constructions, characteristics and ability of the GSPP are analyzed and described. Real-time simulation of active sonar design with a 48 channel cylindrical array and 50% redundancy is carried out using four DSP boards on GSPP. We conclude that the digital sonar can be realized conveniently by means of GSPP.