Low-Power

Cadence Turns the Xtensa Architecture Up to Eleven*

At January's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Cadence showed that has picked up the baton and continued the pace of acquired company Tensilica by announcing the eleventh generation of the Xtensa configurable processor architecture. First unveiled in 1999, Xtensa has received evolutionary advancements on a roughly two year cycle since that time; in late 2013, for example, InsideDSP covered the Xtensa 10 product release. At the time, Cadence had also unveiled the fifth generation of its LX Read more...

ON Semiconductor's Hearing Aid SoCs: Distributed Performance That's Easy on Batteries

The hearing aid is a challenging digital signal processing application. The amount of processing horsepower required is formidable, both to filter out ambient noise and to amplify and otherwise enhance sounds that are of importance, and especially considering that the signal processing chain must be traversed within a few milliseconds in order that the user doesn't perceive lip sync loss or other visual-to-audible delays. But long battery life is equally essential; no hearing aid owner wants to Read more...

Case Study: BDTI's Expert, Independent Analysis Enables Optimum Vision Processor Selection

A growing number of products are incorporating computer vision capabilities. This, in turn, has led to rapid growth in the number of processors being offered for vision applications.  Selecting the best processor (whether a chip for use in a system design, or an IP core for use in an SoC) is challenging, for several reasons. First, these processors use very diverse architecture approaches, which makes it tough to compare them. Second, because vision applications and algorithms are also quite Read more...

ARM Cortex-M7: Digital Signal Processing Drives Family Evolution

ARM's Cortex-A series of high-performance CPU cores garner significant attention by virtue of their use in high-volume, high-visibility smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics devices. But company's Cortex-M and Cortex-R processor families, which target embedded applications, are even more widely used. The latest Cortex-M family member, the just-announced Cortex-M7, further boosts performance especially in floating-point and other digital signal processing applications, blurring Read more...

The Movidius Myriad 2: An Embedded Vision Processor Through and Through

Substantial industry investment in a particular application, both in terms of silicon devices and the software running on and interacting with them, is often a barometer of that application's transition toward mainstream adoption. This has definitely been the case recently for the practical implementation of computer vision technology, which for decades was limited to academic research and niche commercial uses. Now, however, the steadily improving performance, power consumption and cost- Read more...

Sensory: Voice and Face Recognition Blended Intelligently

Sensory has built its business and made its name over the past 20 years in voice detection and speech recognition, as InsideDSP's April 2013 coverage of the company's TrulyHandsFree always-on voice activation algorithm showcased. However, as Gordon Haupt, the company's director of vision technology, noted during a recent briefing, the name "Sensory" isn't speech-specific, indicative of the company’s long-term aspiration to expand beyond microphones into algorithms fed by other types of input Read more...

Case Study: Quantifying the Incremental Battery Draw of Advanced Audio Processing

Mobile phones are rapidly and dramatically expanding beyond their historical usage as voice-only communications devices, adding a variety of wireless data-fed text, email, web browsing and other functions, supplementing (and in many cases supplanting) the facilities of dedicated still and video cameras, and serving as portable multimedia playback platforms. But all of these functions consume power, and both users and designers of mobile phones are very concerned about battery life. Similarly, Read more...

Synopsys' EM5D and EM7D Processor Cores: The ARC Architecture Gains DSP Capabilities

Although the ARC brand has kept a relatively low profile since being acquired by Synopsys in 2009, Synopsys reports that the ARC family of licensable cores are on track to ship more than 1.5 billion units this year. Until recently, ARC's offerings were "vanilla" Harvard architecture CPUs with no DSP-optimized features. That's all changed with the latest EM5D and EM7D (the "D" standing for "DSP"), the first two members of the EM DSP family, which were introduced in late May and are generally Read more...

Lithography, Architecture Evolutions Boost Analog Devices' Mid-Range Blackfin Devices

The April 2012 edition of InsideDSP covered Analog Devices' BF60x family, which as the then-published product roadmap indicated, was the successor to the high end of the BF5xx product range (Figure 1). Figure 1. Analog Devices' new BF70x products fill the "single core Blackfin" next-generation slot on the company's published roadmap two years ago. All four BF60x family members run at clock speeds of up to 500 MHz and integrate a dual Blackfin DSP cores; the BF608 and BF609 additionally embed a Read more...

Case Study: Diverse Assistance Leads To Vision Processing Optimization Success

As computer vision is deployed into a variety of new applications, driven by the emergence of powerful, low-cost, and energy-efficient processors, companies need to find ways to squeeze demanding vision processing algorithms into size-, weight-, power, and cost-constrained systems. Fortunately, BDTI's foundation as a benchmarking services company has, as has been mentioned before, provided its engineers with extensive skills in optimizing software to best exploit processor capabilities. And it' Read more...