Case Studies

Case Study: Digital Signal Processing Library Development Enables Effective Processor Deployments

As applications become more complex, and processors become more powerful, system developers increasingly rely on off-the-shelf software components to enable rapid and efficient application development. This is particularly true in digital signal processing, where application developers expect to have access to libraries of optimized building-block functions to speed their work. A leading SoC developer recently contracted BDTI to assist it in developing a comprehensive library of software Read more...

Case Study: BDTI Delivers Bit-Exact, On-Time Audio Benefits

Qualcomm recently opened up the QDSP6 (aka "Hexagon") DSP core in its Snapdragon SoCs to programming access by its customers and software developer partners. Multimedia applications, for example, can benefit from leveraging QDSP6 processing resources, boosting overall performance, minimizing overall power consumption, and freeing up the CPU to tackle other tasks. But it can take significant time and effort to get up to speed on a new architecture and make optimum use of its potential, no matter 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 that, 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...

Case Study: Independent Evaluation Enables a Development Kit to Hit a Home Run

BDTI is well known for its software-related capabilities: performance- and power consumption-related benchmarking, for example, along with algorithm evaluation and development and optimization work. In such projects, BDTI frequently employs semiconductor manufacturers' evaluation boards and associated software toolsets, which are often combined to create development kits. And as noted several months ago, BDTI is no stranger to hardware development, either, partnering with chip suppliers to co- Read more...

Case Study: Chip Vendors, Walk a Mile in Your Customers’ Shoes

Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated.  Chips are getting more complicated.  And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger.  As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits.  Design engineers rely on these kits to quickly evaluate chips and prototype key portions of their systems. Clearly chip manufacturers recognize that development kits are important, and there are hundreds available.  But the quality of these Read more...

Case Study: BDTI-Developed, DSP-Enabled Algorithms Optimize Speaker Sound

The tension between cost and quality is one of the fundamental tradeoffs in the design of consumer electronics devices—and many other systems. Customers predominantly select among competing products based on price, especially in these challenging economic times, but consumers are also unwilling to short-change perceived quality. For example, to minimize bill-of-materials costs, engineers prefer to incorporate low-cost speakers in their designs. These entry-level transducers typically exhibit Read more...

Case Study: Optimizing Evaluation Board Design Decisions

BDTI is well known for its software-related capabilities: performance- and power consumption-related benchmarking, for example, along with algorithm evaluation, and development and optimization work. But the company is no stranger to hardware, either. Take, for example, its recent testing of DSP functions implemented in Altera FPGAs, or its successful effort to quantify the power draw of audio processing algorithms running on tablet computers. Or take this month's case study, which stems from a Read more...

Case Study: Cool Algorithm, But Will It Fit in My Product?

Algorithms are the essence of digital signal processing; they are the mathematical "recipes" that transform signals in useful ways. Companies developing new algorithms, or considering purchasing or licensing algorithms, often need to assess whether an algorithm will fit within their processing budget—and thereby within their cost and power consumption targets. But estimating an algorithm's processing load can be difficult if the algorithm has not already been carefully mapped onto the target Read more...

Case Study: BDTI Develops Optimized Audio Algorithms to Deliver the Sweet Sound of Success

Qualcomm recently opened up the QDSP6 (aka "Hexagon") DSP core in its Snapdragon SoCs to programming access by its customers and software developer partners. Multimedia applications, for example, can benefit from leveraging QDSP6 processing resources, boosting overall performance, minimizing overall power consumption, and freeing up the CPU to tackle other tasks. And mobile application processors such as Snapdragon are increasingly finding use in a diversity of embedded applications beyond the Read more...

Case Study: Measuring 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...