Case Studies

Case Study: Chip Design Costs Make Processor Core Choice Paramount

As we’ve all heard, the cost of creating a custom chip has skyrocketed. Still, there are applications where a custom chip is justified—usually by specialized, demanding technical requirements. Today, custom chips often incorporate multiple processor cores.  The choice of a licensable processor core is among the first decisions that a design team makes, and may be the decision that they live with the longest:  the hassles of porting software from one processor architecture to another mean that 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 Read more...

Case Study: Showing a Processor’s Full Potential with Optimized Benchmarks

In the last issue of Inside DSP, we explained why good benchmarks are important both for processor users and for processor designers.  We also discussed why optimized benchmarks are critical when assessing a processor’s performance for digital signal processing tasks.  Given that optimized benchmarks are required, if you’re a processor vendor, how do you ensure that your benchmark implementations are fully optimized, and therefore show your processor’s full potential?  Optimizing digital Read more...

Case Study: Choosing the Right Benchmarks for the Job

As embedded processors and applications become increasingly complex, good benchmarks are more important than ever.  System designers need good benchmarks to judge whether a processor will meet the needs of their applications, and to make accurate comparisons among processors.  Processor developers need good benchmarks to assess how their processors stack up against the competition—and to prove their processors’ capabilities to customers. But what exactly comprises a good benchmark? One Read more...

Case Study: Patent Litigation Support

These days it’s not uncommon to see patent infringement claims settled for hundreds of millions of dollars. There was RIM’s settlement with NTP for $612 million, Intel’s with Intergraph for $600 million and with MicroUnity for $300 million, and the blockbuster, Qualcomm’s settlement with Broadcomm for $891 million. These huge sums stimulate the equivalent of high-tech ambulance-chasing: individuals and companies pursuing patent infringement claims against companies with deep pockets, seeking Read more...

Case Study: Benchmarking PowerPoint Processors

Processor designers know that a cycle-accurate simulator can be used to benchmark a processor that has not yet been fabricated. But many designers don’t realize that it’s also possible to benchmark an idea for a processor, a processor that may exist only in PowerPoint slides—and that there are good reasons for doing so. As BDTI’s president Jeff Bier has written in his column, BDTI has seen a number of cases in which a processor vendor used BDTI’s benchmarks on its fully-designed processor, 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, 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: Is Your Development Kit Ready for Customers?

Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and hardware designers require more than just chips from their chip vendors. They demand reliable, easy-to-use software development tools, OS support, middleware and application software components, I/O support, and more—right out of the box. To win design-ins, a chip vendor must deliver much more than just processing performance on a board. Vendors are responding to this demand by packaging specialized boards, development Read more...

Case Study: Reliable Benchmark Results Lead to Good Design Decisions

To paraphrase business guru Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t design it.”  In the world of embedding processing, processor developers and users alike rely on benchmarks to measure and assess the capabilities of embedded processors on their target applications.  Benchmark results enable processor developers to understand where they stand in relation to their design targets and their competitors.  And in order to build competitive product and get to market quickly, system and Read more...

Case Study: Technical Due Diligence

Although the economy appears to be on the mend, established technology companies and venture capitalists alike remain cautious about their investments.  When considering investments, acquisitions or major product purchase decisions, they are wary of accepting companies’ claims about their technology at face value and often turn to outside experts for technical due diligence evaluations to assess and manage risk. Technical due diligence can encompass a broad-based evaluation of the value of Read more...