Tools

Synopsys Acquires Custom-Processor Design Tool Supplier Target Compiler Technologies

Corporate acquisitions occur for many reasons. Sometimes the market is too small to support multiple participants. Sometimes the acquiring company wants to eliminate a competitor, with aspirations of obtaining the acquired company's customers in the process. Sometimes the acquired company's products are deemed superior in some way, or maybe the acquiring company just wants to get access to a "crack" team of employees. And sometimes multiple of these motivations are behind the transaction. The Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—How Can We Empower Machines to Understand? (Find Out on May 29th in Santa Clara!)

If you're a regular reader of this column, you know that I'm enthusiastic about the potential of "embedded vision" – the widespread, practical use of computer vision in embedded systems, mobile devices, PCs, and the cloud. Processors and sensors with sufficient performance for sophisticated computer vision are now available at price, size, and power consumption levels appropriate for many markets, including cost-sensitive consumer products and energy-sipping portable devices. This is ushering Read more...

AMD's Kaveri: Will GPGPU Finally Become a Mainstream Reality?

Back in October 2011, InsideDSP covered both recently introduced and pending CPU-plus-GPU products from AMD, along with the cores that they were based on. At the time, AMD referred to CPU-plus-GPU integration as "Fusion"; the company has subsequently renamed such products as APUs (Accelerated Processing Units). And back then, AMD was actively selling two APU lines; "Ontario" (along with the higher-power "Zacate" variant), based on the mainstream "Bobcat" CPU core, and the higher-end "Llano", Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Practical Portable Parallel Programming?

By now, most people who work with processors—whether in data centers, PCs, mobile devices, or embedded systems—understand that parallel processing is the way to get both high compute performance and good energy efficiency for most applications. And most of these people also realize that programming parallel processors is challenging. There are many different types of parallel processors, including CPUs with single-instruction/multiple data capabilities, multi-core CPUs, DSPs, GPUs and FPGAs, Read more...

SigmaDSP: Analog Devices Upgrades the Product Line Significantly

Those of you familiar with Analog Devices' longstanding presence in the DSP market, via the company's Blackfin, SHARC and TigerSHARC product lines, can be forgiven for assuming that SigmaDSP is yet another family of general-purpose DSPs (Figure 1). Figure 1. SigmaDSP is an audio-focused entry-level family offering in Analog Devices' digital signal processing product portfolio. SigmaDSP does implement audio-centric digital signal processing functions, which explains the "DSP" in the name. Read more...

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...

Vision-Based Advanced Driver Assistance: TI Hopes You'll Give Its Latest SoCs a Chance

Embedded vision, the use of computer vision techniques to extract meaning from visual inputs in embedded systems, mobile devices, PCs and the cloud, is rapidly becoming a significant adopter of digital signal processing technology and techniques. This fact is likely already well known to those of you familiar with the Embedded Vision Alliance, which BDTI founded more than two years ago. If you've visited the Alliance website, you're probably already aware from the content published there that Read more...

Data Compression Innovator Samplify Rumored to be For Sale

[Editor's Note: In July, BDTI received a technology update briefing from Samplify, a start-up that has pioneered innovative approaches to, and applications of, data compression in embedded systems. Subsequently, rumors came to our attention suggesting that Samplify's investors are looking to sell the company. In response to our inquiry on this point, a Samplify representative said that it is company policy not to comment on speculation.] Many modern embedded systems require enormous data 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...