Low-Power

Case Study: Squeezing Big Algorithms into Small Power Budgets Enables Mobile Audio Quality

Today's smartphones are technological marvels that deliver an extraordinary range of capabilities from GPS-based navigation to sophisticated photography. But sometimes we just want to make a phone call. And particularly when we're on the move, who hasn't struggled to hear the other party or to be heard on a mobile call? Realizing the importance of intelligible phone calls – not to mention a strong need to differentiate their products – smartphone manufacturers are incorporating increasingly Read more...

Freescale Introduces New Embedded Processors and Modules

Back in early 2013, the smartphone market was red hot, as was demand for Amazon's Kindle and other e-book readers. And the tablet market, although comparatively nascent, was in a rapid growth phase, as was interest in alternative computer platforms such as Google's Chrome O/S-based products. The substantial processing demands of these and other similar applications are evident in the formidable resources integrated within Freescale Semiconductor's i.MX 6 family introduced that same year: one to Read more...

Sensory Adds Deep Learning Support to TrulyHandsFree

Sensory's TrulyHandsFree software, which InsideDSP last covered at its v3 introduction in early 2013, precedes limited-vocabulary speech recognition with voice detection involving a specific key word or phrase. And with latest version 4.0, Sensory adopts convolutional (i.e. "deep learning") neural network (CNN) techniques. Jeff Bier began a recent editorial with the following statement: Lately, neural network algorithms have been gaining prominence in computer vision and other fields where Read more...

Case Study: For Ultra Low Power, the Right Algorithms Are Key

When engineers set out to design a system (such as a wearable or handheld device) for minimum power consumption, there's a tendency to focus on selecting the most energy efficient processor and on optimizing the software for maximum efficiency. These are important steps, to be sure, but when the application is based on digital signal processing, choosing the right algorithms can be even more important. Digital signal processing is, of course, fundamentally the application of math to signals, Read more...

Analog Devices' SHARC Doubles Up, Adds ARM Option

The SHARC DSP family has long been a design staple of mid-range and high-end audio, industrial and other digital signal-processing intensive applications. With its two new series of products, Analog Devices delivers dual-core SHARC to the market for the first time. And the ADSP-SC58x devices also integrate an ARM processor core to tackle system control code functions (Figure 1). Figure 1. A migration from the 65 nm to 40 nm process node enables a high degree of integration in Analog Devices' Read more...

CogniVue's "Opus" APEX Generation 3: Vision Processing With Implementation Flexibility

Practical computer vision (i.e. "embedded vision") is rapidly becoming a mainstream reality. Numerous processor chip and core suppliers have responded to increasing market demand with a variety of processor options. One of the first companies to target the vision processor space, Quebec, Canada-based CogniVue, has just unveiled its third-generation core architecture. CogniVue's path to the vision market involved several intermediate steps. The company was initially founded fifteen years ago by Read more...

Cadence's Tensilica Fusion: DSP for the IoT

The "Internet of Things" (IoT), one of the hottest topics in technology today, is widely anticipated to be a notable driver of both semiconductor and software demand in coming years. Key to an understanding of the IoT opportunity, as a recent article published on the Embedded Vision Alliance website notes, is its machine-to-machine aspect. Content generated at the source end of the IoT communication link is created by devices using various sensor technologies, which are forecast to experience Read more...

Synopsys Fields Processor Core for Neural Network Computer Vision Applications

The computer vision market is in a period of dramatic expansion. Market forecasts consolidated by Synopsys attest to the burgeoning adoption of practical computer vision (i.e. "embedded vision") technology (Figure 1) in a range of high-volume products. This growth is fueled by the increasing performance and decreasing cost and power consumption of processors, and by the growing awareness of the value that can be delivered via object detection, tracking, recognition and other vision processing Read more...

CEVA's Computer Vision Advances to the Next Generation

With the MM3101, launched at the January 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, silicon IP supplier CEVA for the first time provided a processor core with instructions and other features specifically tailored for computer vision algorithms.  (The precursor MM2000 and MM3000 were focused predominantly on encoding and decoding images and video). Later, the company released a super-resolution algorithm for computational photography, along with a software framework that enables Android applications to Read more...

Case Study: System Designers Selecting Multimedia Processors Benefit from BDTI Insights

Portable electronics devices are incorporating increasingly sophisticated multimedia capabilities, while at the same time striving to meet tough size, weight, battery life and cost requirements. Recently, a BDTI client launched a design for a new portable multimedia system requiring billions of floating-point operations per second and low input-to-output latency, and single-digit power consumption to enable compact and fan-less system operation. Robust software development tools were also a key Read more...