Digital signal processing (DSP) industry has been growing rapidly over the past few years; it remains the technology driver for the recovering semiconductor industry. Performance evaluation is essential for the users and manufacturers of DSP processors. Since DSP application programs become larger and more complicated, people need new benchmarks for performance evaluation of different DSP processors. We build a new DSP benchmark based on Selectable Mode Vocoder (SMV), a speech-coding program from the 3G wireless applications. Our new DSP benchmark, called SMV benchmark, consists of eight kernel functions. In this paper, we introduce the criteria of selecting kernels and our methodology to build SMV benchmark. We also discuss the characteristics and static analysis of the kernels.