Market growth in the area of thin route satellite communications services has led to consideration of non-traditional system architectures requiring sophisticated on-board processing functions. Surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology exists today which can provide implementation of key on-board processing subsystems by using multicarrier demodulators. This paper presents a review of this signal processing technology, along with a brief review of dispersive SAW device technology as applied to the implementation of multicarrier demodulators for on-board signal processing.