Communication

Adapteva's Epiphany Floating Point Processor Core: A Leading-Edge Lithography May Finally Open Doors

Cost- and power consumption-sensitive digital signal processing applications tend to leverage fixed point processors, for a common fundamental reason: fixed-point processor cores are substantially less complex than their floating-point counterparts, leading to reductions in transistor count and silicon area. Yet fixed-point processing comes with trade-offs of its own; code development, for example, is complicated by the need to comprehend the potential for overflow, underflow and round-off Read more...

New Freescale DSP Core Benchmarked By BDTI, Debuts In Macrocell Base Station SoC

After some five years of architecture definition work and several years of development, Freescale's new StarCore SC3900 DSP core will see its first silicon implementation next quarter in the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 processor for macrocell base station designs, unveiled last month at the Mobile World Congress conference. As mentioned last August in InsideDSP (see "Next-Generation Power Architecture-Based SoCs Embrace Advanced Lithography, Core Virtualization, SIMD Instruction Set"), Freescale Read more...

Picochip and Mindspeed: Former Competitors Unite to Address Wireless Spectrum Needs

The dearth of available wireless spectrum throughout the world, notably in the United States, is one of technology's hottest topics. It's driving network management policies such as bandwidth throttling, data usage caps, and blocks of particular ports, protocols and services, any or all of which (depending on which side of the debate you're on) are overdue and necessary, or overly heavy-handed and fiscally motivated. It's prompting the FCC to prod terrestrial television broadcasters into Read more...

CEVA's XC4000 DSP Core: The Communications Focus Expands Even More

Technology advances ever onward over time, and in fact its pace has accelerated since Jack Kilby's initial integrated circuit demonstration in 1958. So it is that, while CEVA's DSP core licensees are demonstrating SoCs based on the company's current-generation CEVA-XC323 (see "Picochip and Mindspeed: Former Competitors Unite to Address Wireless Spectrum Needs" in this issue of InsideDSP), CEVA is simultaneously unveiling its next-generation core, the XC4000 (Figure 1). Figure 1. CEVA builds Read more...

Next-Generation Power Architecture-Based SoCs Embrace Advanced Lithography, Core Virtualization, SIMD Instruction Set

Freescale's re-engagement with historical Power Architecture (previously known as PowerPC) CPU business segments, such as communications, industrial, medical, military, robotics, and surveillance systems, began in earnest at the June 2008 Freescale Technology Forum when the company unveiled its first QorIQ (pronounced "Core IQ") product families. Responding to longstanding market requests for multi-core offerings, which to date had been addressed by only a single member of the PowerQUICC III Read more...

Start-Up Naratte Launches Novel Ultrasonic Near-Field Communications Solution

Near-field communications (NFC), which traces its heritage to radio-frequency identification (RFID), has lately been promoted as a way to enable mobile phones and other portable devices to serve as electronic wallets. Early examples of the technology, operating on the 13.56 MHz ISO/IEC 18000-3 air interface with transfer rates ranging from 106 kbps to 848 kbps, exist today in cellular handsets such as Google’s Nexus S, developed by Samsung and leveraging a NFC transceiver from NXP Read more...

TI Targets Small Cells with New Multi-Core SoCs

Texas Instruments (TI) is continuing to expand its cellular base-station SoC family, incorporating multiple instances of the TMS320C66x (C66x) DSP core that the company introduced in early 2010. The new TMS320TC16612 (TCI6612) and TMS320TC16614 (TCI6614) chips target femtocell (approximately 64 users) and picocell (approximately 128 users) base station designs. For the first time, TI has also integrated a CPU core―an ARM Cortex-A8―to handle control and management functions. The new chips will Read more...

Xilinx Unveils “Zynq” Extensible Processing Platform Chips

In early 2010, Xilinx previewed its vision for what it calls an “extensible processing platform”—a highly integrated combination of a high-performance embedded processor subsystem and an FPGA.  Earlier this month, that vision came one step closer to reality with Xilinx’s disclosure of details of its first extensible processing platform product family.  The family, named Zynq-7000, initially comprises four chips.  Xilinx says Zynq samples will become generally available in the first half of Read more...

CEVA Hits 1 GHz With Latest TeakLite DSP Core

CEVA has added the CEVA-TL3211 core to its TeakLite family of licensable DSP cores targeting applications ranging from handset baseband processing to audio processing in home-network, multimedia gateway, and living-room multimedia products. According to CEVA, the new core will reach a clock speed of 1 GHz in a 40 nm implementation and includes a new fully-cached memory design. The new core bumps up the performance of the broadly licensed TeakLite family while offering binary compatibility Read more...

Freescale’s New i.MX Application Processors Scale to Quad-Core

Freescale has launched a new family of application processors—the i.MX 6—that includes single-, dual-, and quad-core members along with a complement of hardware accelerators for multimedia applications. The processors combine ARM’s Cortex-A9 CPU with a 3-d graphics controller, video processing unit (VPU), image capture function, and image processing unit (IPU). The family targets a broad range of products from monochrome e-book readers and simple tablets at the low end to netbooks and full- Read more...