In August, DSP Group announced CedarDSPCore, a family of licensable DSP cores that targets a wide range of applications. The CedarDSPCore family has two unusual features that lend it noteworthy flexibility. First, these cores use “computation clusters” rather than a traditional data path. Each “cluster” contains two multiply-accumulate units, an ALU, a shifter, and a register file. Licensees can choose from cores with one, two, or four clusters, depending on the performance requirements of the application. This scalability has two benefits: it allows the CedarDSPCore family to cover a fairly wide performance spectrum, and it facilitates software porting between family members. Scalability is rare among packaged processors but is increasingly common among licensable cores. Other licensors of scalable DSP architectures include 3DSP, LSI Logic, Siroyan, and Tensilica.
The CedarDSPCore family also covers a range of the native data sizes: licensees can choose from
16-, 24-, and 32-bit versions of the processor. Larger data sizes result in larger die sizes, which increase chip cost and power consumption. CedarDSPCore's data size flexibility allows licensees to balance precision vs. die size and power consumption for each application. Such data size flexibility is rarer than scalability; in fact, Tensilica is the only other mainstream core licensor to offer comparable capabilities.
The ongoing shake-out in the core licensing business has made licensees hesitant to embrace new cores. CedarDSPCore has an advantage in this respect: according to a recent Gartner Dataquest study, DSP Group generates about 70 percent of worldwide DSP core licensing revenue. This may ease potential licensees' fears about the long-term viability of CedarDSPCore. On the other hand, CedarDSPCore is DSP Group's first new core in four years and newer players have beaten it to market with high-performance cores. And CedarDSPCore is incompatible with older DSP Group cores, so it cannot rely on an established software base to give it leverage over the newcomers. To succeed in today's market conditions, DSP Group needs world-class tools and third-party support for its new core.
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