A conference engine operates in a multiplex processing scheme and requires a signal hardware summer to process all of the programmed conferences, all of the outputs and all of the input channels. The conference engine is only limited by the number of available input channels, the number of desired conference registers, the speed of the implementation, and the amount of memory available on the target system. The conference engine allows the number of available conference channels, the number of conferences per bridge and the number of bridges to be scaled. Each bridge contains a unique set of conference registers and has full access to the input channel data. Additional conference bridges are added by increasing the operating clock/memory to meet the processing requirements of the additional bridge. Conference registers in each conference bridge can be added/removed depending on the system requirements and are independent of the number of input channels.