Are there any new advanced EE subjects in signal proccessing and communication in this 20 years?

Question

From 1980 to now.

Answer 1

Smaller transistors, thus faster operating speeds, have lead to the ability to implement many coding theory error-correction codes that were thought to be academic exercises 30-40 years.

Example is Turbo codes in the 90s and recently LDPC encoding.
LDPC comes really close to the capacity of an AWGN channel AND the principle to do it was known in the 60's. But back then it would have been possible to actually make a circuit do the work.

Answer 2

Digital Signal Processing would be the biggest advancement. Allows the use of computers instead of circuits to build systems and filters(i.e. cell phones are small because of this)