Low-Power

CEVA's Multimedia DSP Cores: A Framework for Accessing Them, and a New MM3101 Imaging Algorithm

In January 2013, InsideDSP covered the CEVA-MM3101, the company's first DSP core targeted not only at still and video image encoding and decoding tasks (akin to the prior-generation MM2000 and MM3000) but also at a variety of image and vision processing tasks. At that time, the company published the following table of MM3101 functions that it provides to its licensees (Table 1): Table 1. The initial extensive software function library unveiled in conjunction with the CEVA-MM3101 introduction Read more...

Making Images Bitrate-Slight: Has Trusight Seen the (Luminance) Light?

Vision science studies suggest that the eye is able to discern more than 11 bits of dynamic range for each of the three primary colors – red, green and blue – that typically comprise a given scene. The optical nerve connecting each eye to the brain, on the other hand, is only able to pass roughly five bits' (40 levels) worth of each primary color's data. Yet the brain still is capable of discerning more than 10 billion discrete levels of total color depth, equivalent to that of the 11-bit-per- Read more...

TrulyHandsFree: Always-On Speech Recognition From Sensory

"If it has speech recognition, why do we have to use our fingers?" According to Bernie Brafman, Vice President of Business Development at Sensory, that simple question has been at the forefront of many of the company's customers' minds throughout Sensory's 19-year existence. That same question has therefore guided the privately held company's technology and product roadmap. But actualizing this aspiration involves, at first glance, difficult tradeoffs. Always-active speech recognition requires Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Power is the New Performance

Soon after BDTI got its start in the early 1990s, we became known for our benchmarks. We benchmarked whatever types of processors people were using for embedded digital signal processing: first DSPs, then CPUs, and eventually MCUs, FPGAs, and GPUs, too. One of the interesting things about benchmarking processors for embedded digital signal processing tasks is the importance of optimization. Optimization is central to digital signal processing applications. In a typical embedded DSP application Read more...

BDTI Evaluates Floating-Point DSP Performance and Energy Efficiency of Altera 28 nm FPGAs

Back in September 2011, an InsideDSP article described a just-published analysis conducted by BDTI and sponsored by Altera, evaluating the viability of implementing complex hardware-accelerated single-precision floating-point functions on FPGA fabric. As I wrote then: To date, FPGAs have been used almost exclusively for fixed-point digital signal processing functions. Although FPGA vendors have long offered floating-point primitive libraries, the performance of FPGAs in floating-point Read more...

Tensilica's IVP: The Vision Processing Core Market Gets Another Entry

In a recent interview in EE Times, BDTI co-founder and president Jeff Bier commented: Multi-core CPUs are very powerful and programmable, but not very energy-efficient.  So if you have a battery-powered device that is going to be doing a lot of vision processing, you may be motivated to run your vision algorithms on a more specialized processor. Bier could have been speaking about CEVA's MM3101 processing core, which InsideDSP covered in its January 2012 edition. Or he could have been referring Read more...

QDSP6 V4: BDTI Benchmark Results and Implementation Details Of Qualcomm's DSP Core

The article, "QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core," which appeared in the June 2012 edition of InsideDSP, showcased Qualcomm’s decision to open up access to its DSP core via a software development kit. This decision corresponded with the release of the fourth version (V4) of the sixth generation (QDSP6, aka "Hexagon") of the company's proprietary DSP architecture, found in the company's 28 nm-based Snapdragon S4 SoCs. To be clear, this broadened Read more...

Case Study: Measuring the Incremental Battery Draw of Advanced Audio Processing

Mobile phones are rapidly and dramatically expanding beyond their historical usage as voice-only communications devices, adding a variety of wireless data-fed text, email, web browsing and other functions, supplementing (and in many cases supplanting) the facilities of dedicated still and video cameras, and serving as portable multimedia playback platforms. But all of these functions consume power, and both users and designers of mobile phones are very concerned about battery life. Similarly, Read more...

Texas Instruments' Latest KeyStone II SoCs: Is A Special-Purpose Server Strategy Feasible?

The October issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine includes an interesting article titled "Could Supercomputing Turn to Signal Processors (Again)?" which discusses the viability of developing supercomputers using digital signal processors. It covers, among other things, a recent analysis project co-staffed by engineers at Texas Instruments and researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, to compare the floating-point operation-per-watt capabilities of TI's DSPs against those of other and now-more- Read more...

Microchip Technology's GestIC: An E-Field Based Competitor (or Companion) to Camera-Based Gesture Technology

Touch-free gesture interfaces are increasingly entering the public consciousness, spurred on by trendsetting popular implementations such as Microsoft's Kinect. And, as Tom Cruise's portrayal of Chief John Anderton in the future-forecasting film Minority Report suggests, they're equally compelling beyond the game console. Camera (i.e. image sensor)-based gesture interface implementations may be most common nowadays, but they're not the only feasible approach. Several weeks ago, for example, Read more...