InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Altera Jumps to 40 nm with Stratix IV

Not to be outdone by rival Xilinx, Altera has made a major announcement of its own. In mid-May, Altera unveiled its next-generation high-performance FPGA family, the Stratix IV, and announced that the family will be fabbed in a 40 nm TSMC process.  Xilinx beat Altera to the 65 nm node with its Virtex-5 chips, but with this announcement, it appears that Altera will leapfrog Xilinx to 40 nm—assuming that Xilinx doesn’t come out with 40 nm chips before the Stratix IV is expected to start Read more...

Case Study: Making Compilers Smarter

Fifteen years ago DSP engineers expected to write and optimize most of their software in assembly language, and they did it on DSP processors with obscure and highly specialized instruction sets.  Back then, compilers for DSP processors were inefficient and couldn’t use many of the processors’ specialized performance-improving features. If you wanted to use bit-reversed addressing or circular buffers or fill delay slots, for example, you’d have to write that code yourself.  Today, most Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—“DSP” becomes ubiquitous, passé

When my partners and I founded BDTI back in the early 90’s, “DSP” was in the process of becoming both a hot technology and a widely used abbreviation. The abbreviation meant two distinct things: digital signal processing, and digital signal processor.  You could usually figure out which one was meant by the context, but in some ways they were interchangeable—if you were doing digital signal processing, you were probably doing it on a digital signal processor. Today, DSP (in both senses) is Read more...

3DLabs Aims Massively Parallel Chips at Portable Multimedia

When people talk about massively parallel, multicore chips, they’re usually talking about chips for high-performance line-powered applications, like WiMAX base stations or desktop video processing.  But 3DLabs is headed in a different direction.  The fabless chip company offers a massively parallel media processor, the DMS-02, which the company says is a perfect fit for portable multimedia devices with demanding video and audio processing requirements—such as high-end cellular handsets and Read more...

IBM’s Cell for Embedded?

IBM’s multicore Cell processor has garnered a lot of media attention over the last couple of years, as the multicore approach itself has become something of a juggernaut. BDTI recently investigated the current state of Cell products, and whether the architecture is likely to get significant traction in embedded applications. The Cell processor incorporates eight “synergistic processing elements” (“SPEs”), each of which is a complex,  superscalar processor with SIMD features for accelerating Read more...

Case Study: Where Does Your Processing Engine Fit In?

Developing a new signal processing engine is expensive and risky, particularly for a small start-up or for an established company moving into an unfamiliar market.  There are good reasons to take that risk: signal processing has become ubiquitous in a wide range of application areas, and offers the potential for high revenues. The flip side is that the market is already densely populated with all kinds of signal processing engines: single-core chips, multi-core chips, massively parallel Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Corporate Bureaucracy Blocks Innovation

As the president of a small company that frequently works with big companies, I am often frustrated by how long it takes to get from a handshake agreement to a signed contract. The process can be absurdly slow and painful, and that’s bad for business on both sides. As an example, BDTI was recently contacted by a big company that had an urgent high-priority project they needed our help with. We quickly reached a verbal agreement with the responsible manager there, and we were ready to start Read more...

Hantro 8190 Will Bring YouTube to Cell Phones

A few months ago, video codec vendor On2 announced its acquisition of Hantro, a company that offers licensable video codec accelerators and software.  At the Mobile World Congress in February, On2 unveiled the first offspring from the marriage—the Hantro 8190 licensable silicon IP core. The 8190 is a video decoder core that’s intended for use in chips targeting mobile handsets, and supports the Flash video format (FLV) used by YouTube and Facebook.  So if you get an 8190-equipped cell phone Read more...

Case Study: Shoehorning Maximum Signal Processing into Minimal Processors

Digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms are increasingly important in embedded systems. For example, compute-intensive multimedia functions are finding their way into applications ranging from toys to appliances to telephones. But in many of these systems, cost constraints dictate a processor with very minimal horsepower and limited—or no—signal-processing-specific features.    A classic example of this kind of processor is the ARM7. This architecture was introduced in 1993, has no DSP Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—¿Hola? ¿Hola? I Can’t Hear You Now.

I spent some time at the Mobile World Congress in Spain last month, where pretty much everyone involved in wireless technologies showed up. I am happy to report that there were some very cool new technologies demonstrated there, like Texas Instruments’ miniature video projector that may one day be incorporated into cell phones.  People were also chattering about fourth-generation (“4G”) cellular networks, which are (of course) supposed to yield cell networks that are faster and better than Read more...