Audio

Cadence Turns the Xtensa Architecture Up to Eleven*

At January's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Cadence showed that has picked up the baton and continued the pace of acquired company Tensilica by announcing the eleventh generation of the Xtensa configurable processor architecture. First unveiled in 1999, Xtensa has received evolutionary advancements on a roughly two year cycle since that time; in late 2013, for example, InsideDSP covered the Xtensa 10 product release. At the time, Cadence had also unveiled the fifth generation of its LX Read more...

Case Study: BDTI-Developed, QDSP6-Optimized Audio Algorithms Deliver the Sweet Sounds 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...

ON Semiconductor's Hearing Aid SoCs: Distributed Performance That's Easy on Batteries

The hearing aid is a challenging digital signal processing application. The amount of processing horsepower required is formidable, both to filter out ambient noise and to amplify and otherwise enhance sounds that are of importance, and especially considering that the signal processing chain must be traversed within a few milliseconds in order that the user doesn't perceive lip sync loss or other visual-to-audible delays. But long battery life is equally essential; no hearing aid owner wants to Read more...

ARM Cortex-M7: Digital Signal Processing Drives Family Evolution

ARM's Cortex-A series of high-performance CPU cores garner significant attention by virtue of their use in high-volume, high-visibility smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics devices. But company's Cortex-M and Cortex-R processor families, which target embedded applications, are even more widely used. The latest Cortex-M family member, the just-announced Cortex-M7, further boosts performance especially in floating-point and other digital signal processing applications, blurring Read more...

Lithography, Architecture Evolutions Boost Analog Devices' Mid-Range Blackfin Devices

The April 2012 edition of InsideDSP covered Analog Devices' BF60x family, which as the then-published product roadmap indicated, was the successor to the high end of the BF5xx product range (Figure 1). Figure 1. Analog Devices' new BF70x products fill the "single core Blackfin" next-generation slot on the company's published roadmap two years ago. All four BF60x family members run at clock speeds of up to 500 MHz and integrate a dual Blackfin DSP cores; the BF608 and BF609 additionally embed a 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...

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: 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—"Could You Repeat That, Please?"

Lately I've been spending many hours on conference calls: Early morning calls with colleagues in Europe and India, mid-day calls with customers in the U.S., and late evening calls with partners in China. I often find these calls difficult and fatiguing--not because of what people are saying, but because I frequently have trouble understanding what people are saying. At first, I chalked this up to what seemed like the obvious explanations: "It's late in the day… It's my seventh call today… The Read more...

Dolby Voice: A Spatially Inclusive Conferencing Choice

Our team at BDTI includes people based in California, Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island. And our customers are all over the world. So, we all spend a lot of time in conference calls...often-frustrating conference calls. Any of you in a similar situation will immediately know what I'm talking about. Conventional conferencing systems blend together mono narrowband signals coming from the various callers (with cellular voice being the most egregious sonic choice), outputting a mixed mono Read more...