InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Case Study: Is Your Development Kit Ready for Customers?

Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and integrators require more than just hardware from their chip vendors. They demand reliable, easy-to-use software development tools, OS support, middleware and application software components, I/O support, and more—right out of the box. To win design-ins, a chip vendor must deliver much more than just processing performance on a board. Vendors are responding to this demand by packaging development boards, software Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Getting-the-Box Experience

Whenever I talk to chip and tool vendors about the ease-of-use of their products, they invariably brag about how much time they’ve invested in ensuring a good “out-of-the-box experience.”  What they mean is that, when a customer first starts using one of their products (say, a development kit), the customer finds it easy to get the tool up and running.  This is important, and it’s hard to do well.  We here at BDTI often run into glitches in this area: things like missing files, documentation Read more...

Microchip Offers High-Performance DSP Library for PIC32

This month Microchip announced a “high-performance” software library of common DSP functions for its 32-bit microcontroller family, the PIC32. This library replaces Microchip’s earlier DSP library for the PIC32, which was quietly released last October. The library includes 16- and 32-bit vector math routines, 16-bit filters, and 16- and 32-bit FFTs.  Library components are implemented as C-callable assembly and are free of charge; support for the new functions has been added to the MPLAB C Read more...

BDTI Releases Benchmark Results for Toshiba's Venezia Platform

BDTI recently completed a benchmark analysis of the Toshiba MeP “Media embedded Processor” core and “IVC2” SIMD coprocessor, both of which are used in Toshiba’s Venezia mobile multimedia platform. The MeP is a licensable core that is intended to be used as a building block in multi-core, multimedia-oriented SoCs, typically with multiple MeP cores on a chip.  Each MeP core can be customized with specialized instructions, co-processors, and memory sizes. The base MeP core is a single-issue Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Massively Parallel Chips Can Lead to Sticky Software

Multicore and massively parallel chips are gaining momentum in embedded applications, and their increasing market acceptance is likely to have some interesting consequences. One of these, I believe, may be that companies that make massively parallel chips and tools—and their customers—will have to grapple with “stickier” software. In general, each multicore processor vendor has a different approach to supporting multicore software development.  For example, Tilera and picoChip both offer Read more...

High-Performance CEVA-XC Core Targets 4G Handsets, Infrastructure

In February CEVA announced a new family of high-performance licensable DSP cores, the CEVA-XC family. CEVA-XC cores target 4G cellular applications, including LTE and WiMax, and are intended for use not just in handsets (as with previous CEVA cores) but also in infrastructure hardware.  The CEVA-XC is an offshoot of the CEVA-X architecture (the “C” stands for communications), but the new core family is much more powerful than its predecessors. The highest-performance version supports, for Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Innovation Thrives Even in Tough Economy

The news in our industry certainly is discouraging these days. Every week we read about high-tech companies succumbing to the economic crisis. Big companies are having big layoffs, and small companies are quietly disappearing. Start-ups are unable to secure funding.  But amidst all of this doom and gloom, I have found a source of real encouragement:  I have been struck in recent weeks by the realization that innovation in the electronics industry is not dead.  Far from it. This is Read more...

Case Study: Improving Products and Product Announcements—Cost-Effectively

We all know that test marketing is the best way to see if a product meets buyers’ needs.  Household and consumer product manufacturers test their products with a select test market as a matter of course.  They use test marketing as a rehearsal for product introduction and to avoid disasters.  For technology developers and vendors, test marketing can be just as valuable, but finding the right test market can be tricky.  After all, the right test market is the target market—and when this is the Read more...

BDTI Releases Benchmark Results for CEVA-Teaklite-III

BDTI has released BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks™ results for the CEVA-TeakLite-III core from CEVA. As we’ve written previously, CEVA-TeakLite-III is a 32-bit DSP core that primarily targets audio applications (both portable and high-definition) but also targets VoIP and cellular baseband. It is the third generation of CEVA’s TeakLite architecture, and the first to use a native 32-bit data size. The CEVA-TeakLite-III also supports SIMD (single-instruction, multiple data) dual-16-bit MACs. The Read more...

Case Study: Measuring Energy Consumption of Embedded Applications

Energy consumption is a chief concern for most embedded applications, especially for portable applications where battery life is paramount. In these applications, an accurate understanding of energy consumption is critical to processor selection and to system design. Unfortunately, many obstacles hinder comparisons of processors’ energy consumption. One key problem is that processor vendors usually report power consumption, not energy consumption. Calculating energy consumption—which is Read more...