Communication

Tensilica Fills Out Portfolio with Dual-MAC DSP Core

This article has been modified from its original content.  The original article contained a reference to the performance of the CEVA X-1620 core on a compiled C language implementation of the AMR-NB vocoder; this reference has been removed.  These results were taken from a 2007 CEVA white paper.  CEVA states that the X-1620 core is no longer offered for license and has been superseded by the CEVA X-1622.  CEVA also states that the compiled-code performance results for the CEVA X-1622 on the AMR Read more...

MIPS Positioning to Catch Android Wave

MIPS recently announced that Android has been ported to the MIPS architecture, with the goal of enabling its use in a variety of consumer-oriented applications. Android is an open-source operating system plus middle-ware and applications, and is backed by Google. (Google acquired a small start-up called “Android” in 2005, and continued development of Android software.)  Android was originally developed for use in handsets and was released in open-source form in 2007 by the Open Handset Read more...

Tensilica ConnX BBE Combines SIMD, VLIW for Baseband Performance

Last month Tensilica unveiled the first member of its new “ConnX” family of licensable DSP cores, the ConnX Baseband Engine (BBE), which combines VLIW with SIMD to support a wide range of parallel operations. As part of the announcement, Tensilica has also rebranded two of its existing products: the Diamond 545CK core and Vectra DSP engine are now known as the ConnX 545CK and ConnX Vectra, respectively. Tensilica says it has a lead ConnX BBE customer that taped out a chip in June; the core Read more...

New Details Emerge on NXP’s CoolFlux BSP Core

This month NXP has unveiled more details on its new licensable core, the CoolFlux BSP, which targets low-power communications baseband processing. The core is based on the similarly named CoolFlux DSP, which was designed for use in low-power audio applications and introduced in 2004. Relative to the older core, NXP says that the CoolFlux BSP has been enhanced to increase its performance in baseband processing while retaining a small footprint and low power. According to NXP, the CoolFlux Read more...

High-Performance CEVA-XC Core Targets 4G Handsets, Infrastructure

In February CEVA announced a new family of high-performance licensable DSP cores, the CEVA-XC family. CEVA-XC cores target 4G cellular applications, including LTE and WiMax, and are intended for use not just in handsets (as with previous CEVA cores) but also in infrastructure hardware.  The CEVA-XC is an offshoot of the CEVA-X architecture (the “C” stands for communications), but the new core family is much more powerful than its predecessors. The highest-performance version supports, for Read more...

Xilinx Intros Spartan-6, Virtex-6; Promises App-Specific Development Support

Xilinx recently introduced two new FPGA chip families, Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 that offer increased capacity and lower power consumption relative to their predecessors. For the first time, the new Spartan and Virtex families use the same underlying architecture to enable easier migration. There are, however, differences in fabrication process and features. Spartan-6 chips will be fabbed in a 45 nm process, while Virtex-6 chips will be fabbed in 40 nm.  Spartan-6 chips incorporate DDR3 Read more...

Texas Instruments Introduces Triple-Core ‘C6474

On October 14, 2008, Texas Instruments introduced a high-performance multi-core DSP, the TMS320C6474 that is intended for use in computationally demanding applications such as communications infrastructure, video surveillance, and medical imaging. The chip features three 1 GHz ‘C64x+ cores, each with its own L1 data and program cache, along with 3 MBytes of aggregate (not shared) L2 cache. As shown in Figure 1, the chip also contains a Viterbi accelerator and turbo-decoding accelerator along Read more...

PolyCore Tools Designed to Ease Multicore Communications

As computational requirements go up and fab processes increasingly bump up against inconvenient physical limitations, multicore solutions are becoming more attractive.  The problem is that no one wants to program them, because there are lots of challenges associated with implementing applications on multiple cores. One challenge lies in handling inter-core communications. How will cores with different data formats, different interconnects, and different OS’s exchange data and talk to each Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Power Nomads

You see them at trade shows, in seminars, in airports—sometimes even in your own office building.  They pace a room’s perimeter and scan its walls, eyes perpetually roving from floor to midline. They sneak behind counters and crawl under tables and thrust their hands into dark and cobwebby corners.  Who are these people?  And what do they want? They are the Laptop Power Nomads, and they are searching for the elusive wall outlet.  I count myself among them. I’ve often found myself in Read more...

HP Licenses Imaging IP for Camera Phones

Late last year Hewlett Packard announced that it was exiting the digital camera market, citing a lack of growth in that business sector.  But just because HP has quit the camera business doesn’t mean it’s abandoning all of its digital camera technologies; the image processing algorithms originally developed for HP’s digital cameras will now be incorporated into cell phones, enabling users to create high-quality prints from pictures taken with camera phones. HP has provided a license of its Read more...