Low-Power

NVIDIA and Qualcomm ARM Up Against Competitors

NVIDIA and Qualcomm, two leading ARM licensees and SoC implementers for high volume consumer electronics systems, are now sampling their latest-generation mobile application processors. Both companies recently published documentation describing the unique design techniques and features of their SoCs. A Tegra Quintuplet NVIDIA's current in-production product line consists of two generations of Tegra-branded devices. The initial Tegra family is a series of single-core devices based on the Read more...

New AMD CPU Architectures Make Notable Digital Signal Processing Advancements

Last month's announcement by Advanced Micro Devices that its "Bulldozer"-based Opteron microprocessors for servers had begun shipping to customers for revenue, followed by last week's release of first public benchmarks for Bulldozer-based AMD FX CPUs, capped off a year-long series of new CPU microarchitectures and devices for the company. Notably, the microarchitectures represent the first fresh offerings from AMD since 2007's K10 microarchitecture, which first appeared in "Barcelona" CPUs Read more...

Sub-$2 DSPs Strive to Cost-Reduce Existing Applications, Expand Market Opportunities

Analog Devices and Texas Instruments both recently unveiled cost-optimized DSPs within one day of each other. Perhaps the seeming near-synchronicity was an innocent fluke. Then again, perhaps one vendor got an inkling of the other's announcement plans and decided that a near-coincident introduction would be an appropriate response. The exact circumstances don't particularly matter; the longstanding highly charged competitive climate between the two companies is fiscally and otherwise beneficial Read more...

Oxford Digital Offers Small Audio DSP Core With Graphical Programming

Even if you are a DSP industry insider, you may not have heard of UK-based Oxford Digital. Since its founding in 2006, the company has established itself primarily as a provider of design consulting services for audio applications. Through its consulting work, Oxford Digital has created a small configurable DSP core called TinyCore and an associated graphical programming environment.  With these assets in hand, Oxford Digital now aims to make its mark licensing silicon intellectual property Read more...

CEVA Hits 1 GHz With Latest TeakLite DSP Core

CEVA has added the CEVA-TL3211 core to its TeakLite family of licensable DSP cores targeting applications ranging from handset baseband processing to audio processing in home-network, multimedia gateway, and living-room multimedia products. According to CEVA, the new core will reach a clock speed of 1 GHz in a 40 nm implementation and includes a new fully-cached memory design. The new core bumps up the performance of the broadly licensed TeakLite family while offering binary compatibility Read more...

Freescale’s New i.MX Application Processors Scale to Quad-Core

Freescale has launched a new family of application processors—the i.MX 6—that includes single-, dual-, and quad-core members along with a complement of hardware accelerators for multimedia applications. The processors combine ARM’s Cortex-A9 CPU with a 3-d graphics controller, video processing unit (VPU), image capture function, and image processing unit (IPU). The family targets a broad range of products from monochrome e-book readers and simple tablets at the low end to netbooks and full- Read more...

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...

Analog Devices Lowers Entry Point for DSP-Enabled Processors

Analog Devices (ADI) has expanded its Blackfin family of DSP-centric embedded processors with a new low-cost family member, the ADSP-BF592. The processor delivers a respectable 800 MMACS (million multiply accumulate cycles per second) for around $3.  The trend is clear:  ever-tinier processors can take on demanding DSP applications in segments ranging from consumer electronics to medical to automotive. To enable its low price, ADI has trimmed the features of the BF592 compared to other Read more...

Xilinx Announces Next-Generation 28 nm FPGA Families

Xilinx recently announced its next-generation “7 series” FPGAs, featuring new power-saving features as well as increased capacity and performance.  The series will be composed of three chip families, all fabricated in TSMC’s high-k metal gate (HKMG) 28 nm technology.  All three families will use the same logic cells, block RAMs, DSP slices, and I/O cells.  Compared to existing 40 nm Xilinx devices, Xilinx claims that, in typical applications, the new FPGAs will reduce power consumption by 50, Read more...

ARM Introduces Cortex-M4 Core for Digital Signal Controllers

This spring, ARM added the Cortex-M4 digital signal controller (DSC) to its processor core line-up.  This product brings digital signal processing capabilities to ARM’s microcontroller core line (the Cortex-M family).  At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose in April, NXP demonstrated a prototype Cortex-M4-based chip running at approximately 150 MHz.  In June, Freescale announced its Kinetis line, also based on the Cortex-M4.  ST Micro and Texas Instruments have also announced their Read more...