Audio

QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core

"There's been at least one DSP core in every chip that Qualcomm's ever made." Qualcomm senior director of product management Rick Maule used this statement as his lead-in to an explanation of the latest-generation QDSP6 architecture, specifically where it fits in the company lengthy DSP development heritage. QDSP6, if you haven't already figured out, refers to Qualcomm's sixth-generation DSP core architecture and is also commonly referred to by its "Hexagon" marketing moniker. The sixth- Read more...

Case Study: Maximizing DSP Software Performance on ARM Processors

A decade ago, ARM processors were mainly found in cell phones, disk drives, and few other specialized applications. These days, they seem to be everywhere, from microcontrollers to tablet PCs. During this same time period, digital signal processing (DSP) tasks such as multimedia and communications functions have also become increasingly common in a wide range of systems. Given these two trends, it's no surprise that there's been a big uptick in products using ARM processors to implement digital Read more...

CEVA's TeakLite-4: Audio Once Again Comes to the Fore

"If it's not broken, don't fix it." That well-known maxim seemed for many years to encapsulate CEVA's approach to audio DSP cores, given that the company's third-generation offering in this particular application space (and first-generation 32-bit core), the TeakLite-III, dates from 2007. However, after both fortifying its foundation communications DSP offerings ("CEVA's XC4000 DSP Core: The Communications Focus Expands Even More") and moving into the emerging embedded vision space ("The CEVA Read more...

Tensilica's HiFi 3 DSP Core: Audio Post-Processing Comes to the Fore

In the digital audio world, the second half of the '90s and a notable portion of the '00s were dominated by the "codec wars." Kicked off by MP3, which emerged in mid-1994, the battle was soon joined by a host of competitors; industry-standard follow-on AAC, Microsoft-developed WMA, RealNetworks-championed RealAudio, open-source favorite Ogg Vorbis, etc. And, from a surround sound standpoint, Dolby Digital was dominant in the DVD era, with DTS ascendant on the Blu-ray successor. Nowadays, Read more...

Sub-$2 DSPs Strive to Cost-Reduce Existing Applications, Expand Market Opportunities

Analog Devices and Texas Instruments both recently unveiled cost-optimized DSPs within one day of each other. Perhaps the seeming near-synchronicity was an innocent fluke. Then again, perhaps one vendor got an inkling of the other's announcement plans and decided that a near-coincident introduction would be an appropriate response. The exact circumstances don't particularly matter; the longstanding highly charged competitive climate between the two companies is fiscally and otherwise beneficial 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 Expands Video-Centric DaVinci Processor Family

Combining a CPU core, DSP core, and numerous video accelerators, new additions to the Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci video-centric processor line target applications ranging from personal media players to multi-channel digital video recorders and professional broadcasting systems. The new chips comprise two families: The TMS320CDM814x (DM814x) family is optimized for low power consumption; these chips support a single video channel at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second (fps), or three Read more...

Oxford Digital Offers Small Audio DSP Core With Graphical Programming

Even if you are a DSP industry insider, you may not have heard of UK-based Oxford Digital. Since its founding in 2006, the company has established itself primarily as a provider of design consulting services for audio applications. Through its consulting work, Oxford Digital has created a small configurable DSP core called TinyCore and an associated graphical programming environment.  With these assets in hand, Oxford Digital now aims to make its mark licensing silicon intellectual property 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...