InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Texas Instruments’ Graphical Programming Tool Generates Prototyping Code

Texas Instruments (TI) recently introduced C6EZFlo, a graphical programming tool for its C6000 and DaVinci DSP families.  C6EZFlo is a prototyping tool to help users quickly develop initial software implementations of their applications.  In particular, C6EZFlo is designed to help programmers develop initialization, configuration, and framework code for their applications.  C6EZFlo generates C code and project files intended to be loaded into TI’s C language Code Composer Studio tool suite Read more...

Case Study: Patent Litigation Support

These days it’s not uncommon to see patent infringement claims settled for hundreds of millions of dollars. There was RIM’s settlement with NTP for $612 million, Intel’s with Intergraph for $600 million and with MicroUnity for $300 million, and the blockbuster, Qualcomm’s settlement with Broadcomm for $891 million. These huge sums stimulate the equivalent of high-tech ambulance-chasing: individuals and companies pursuing patent infringement claims against companies with deep pockets, seeking Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Last One-Man Dog?

What’s a “one-man dog,” you ask?  It’s a dog that works for one person and one person only.  (It’s also the title of a 1929 movie about a dog that solves a murder mystery, but that’s a story for another day.)  What does this have to do with embedded processing or DSP, you ask? Well, I use the phrase “one-man dog” to refer to a processor architecture that is captive to a single semiconductor vendor.  When we started BDTI in the early 1990s, it seemed that just about every digital Read more...

Xilinx Announces Next-Generation 28 nm FPGA Families

Xilinx recently announced its next-generation “7 series” FPGAs, featuring new power-saving features as well as increased capacity and performance.  The series will be composed of three chip families, all fabricated in TSMC’s high-k metal gate (HKMG) 28 nm technology.  All three families will use the same logic cells, block RAMs, DSP slices, and I/O cells.  Compared to existing 40 nm Xilinx devices, Xilinx claims that, in typical applications, the new FPGAs will reduce power consumption by 50, Read more...

Case Study: Benchmarking PowerPoint Processors

Processor designers know that a cycle-accurate simulator can be used to benchmark a processor that has not yet been fabricated. But many designers don’t realize that it’s also possible to benchmark an idea for a processor, a processor that may exist only in PowerPoint slides—and that there are good reasons for doing so. As BDTI’s president Jeff Bier has written in his column, BDTI has seen a number of cases in which a processor vendor used BDTI’s benchmarks on its fully-designed processor, Read more...

Altera Announces Variable-Precision DSP Blocks in Stratix V FPGAs

Altera recently disclosed architecture details of its next generation Stratix V FPGA family.  The architecture features a variable-precision DSP block, designed to provide better resource utilization for algorithms requiring a variety of data widths.  Altera represents this approach via a variable precision “dial,” shown in Figure 1.  In addition to 18-bit by 18-bit (18×18) and 36×36 modes supported by previous blocks, the DSP block natively supports three 9×9 multiply operations or one 18×25 Read more...

Octasic Announces Video and Wireless Processor Chips

Octasic Semiconductor recently announced the OCT2200 family of multi-core DSP processors based on its Opus clockless (asynchronous) DSP core.  The OCT2224M is intended for media processing equipment including video conferencing systems, internet video streaming and transcoding, and video surveillance. The OCT2224W is designed for wireless applications, notably smaller basestations such as femtocell, picocell, and low power basestations.  According to Octasic, it can support GSM, EDGE, HSPA, Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—When the Left Hand Wrestles the Right

Recently, I asked the CEO of a large semiconductor company, “How important are small companies as partners and suppliers of your firm?”  His response was immediate and unequivocal:  “Extremely important.  By definition, small companies are more innovative and quicker than large ones.  We need to harness that for our success.” I suspect that nearly all big-company CEOs would say the same thing.  As Daniel Isenberg, professor of management practice at Babson College said in a recent edition Read more...

Case Study: Choose Your Desert Island Companion Wisely

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person—or which book, or whatever—you’d like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?   Well, choosing a processor is kind of like that.  Except, with a processor, it’s not a game.  Once you’ve chosen a processor, and designed your hardware and software around that processor, it becomes very expensive—and very time-consuming—to switch to another processor.  So, you’re likely to be stuck with whatever Read more...

Freescale Takes on Texas Instruments with Multi-Core DSP Line

Freescale has announced a new high-performance DSP product line, the MSC825x, incorporating up to six StarCore SC3850 DSP cores at up to 1 GHz.  Unlike other high-performance DSPs introduced by Freescale in recent years—which were aimed almost exclusively at wireless infrastructure applications—the new chips target a range of performance-intensive applications, including medical, aerospace and defense, and test and measurement equipment.  This will put the new chips in direct competition with Read more...