Communication

Inside DSP: A New Slant—Welcome to InsideDSP

CMP Media and BDTI are pleased to introduce Inside[DSP], an innovative new series of periodic supplements to EE Times. Each Inside[DSP] supplement will focus on the digital signal-processing technology behind a particular end-equipment market. These will include product categories such as consumer audio and video, mobile multimedia devices, automotive signal-processing applications, and communications equipment. “What?” you say, “Another trade publication? Don't these guys understand that I' Read more...

Reconfigurable Architectures Win Backing for 3G

Reconfigurable processors have long shown great promise for performance-hungry signal processing applications, but these architectures have garnered little mainstream acceptance. This may be changing, though; recent announcements suggest reconfigurable processors may soon become common in 3G base stations. Architecturally, reconfigurable processors share some attributes with digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and application-specific integrated Read more...

Special Feature: New Chips for Wireless Applications

Editor’s Note: In the last month there has been a deluge of chips announced for wireless products. Many of these announcements came from industry leaders, and many of the announcements introduced significant new technologies. While we can’t cover all of the significant announcements from the last two months in this issue of the DSP Insider, we’ll highlight some of the most notable developments in the following feature article. This February, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Read more...

Software Defined Radio: Ready for Prime Time?

Last month BDTI participated in the Software Defined Radio Forum’s first conference. Judging from the presentations given at this conference, software defined radio (SDR) is quickly evolving from an interesting but somewhat academic concept to a mainstream technology. The main driver of this transformation may be the U.S. Department of Defense’s commitment to SDR. Today’s military operations require communications among different branches of the armed forces, but different armed forces Read more...

ARC Addresses VoIP Applications

At last month’s Embedded Processor Forum, ARC described extensions to its ARCtangent customizable processor core that target VoIP applications. The extensions include enhanced saturation and rounding support for existing ALU, shifter, and multiplier operations, and new operations like absolute value and negate. These instructions are intended to improve performance on applications that conform to the bit-exact ITU and ETSI specifications for voice compression algorithms such as G.729. Read more...

Conexant Licenses LSI Logic's ZSP Core for Wireless Mobile Applications

On March 16 LSI Logic announced that it will license its ZSP core to Conexant for use in wireless mobile applications. Following on the heels of Broadcom and IBM, Conexant's deal with LSI Logic is a strong endorsement of the ZSP's potential as a licensable core—a potential that has not always been clear. In 1998 ZSP Corporation, the original developers of the core, demonstrated silicon at a then-impressive 200 MHz, but the architecture was unable to get traction in the market. BDTI analyzed Read more...