Processors

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...

Texas Instruments and OMAP: Increasingly Dedicated to Embedded

In last month's edition of InsideDSP, Jeff Bier's editorial discussed the advantages of (and potential issues with) designing an embedded system around an application processor originally developed for smartphones, tablets, and other high volume devices. To wit, at the beginning of his writeup, Bier mentioned that Texas Instruments had recently stated its intentions to de-emphasize application processors for smartphones and tablets, instead refocusing its OMAP ARM-based SoCs on embedded Read more...

Microchip Technologies' dsPICs: DSP-Capable MCUs Receive Generational Upticks

In reading the InsideDSP newsletter every month, one observation that I hope you've made is that a diversity of processing options exist for implementing digital signal processing algorithms. The alternatives include GPUs, FPGAs, conventional CPUs, and standalone DSPs, along with DSP cores embedded alongside CPUs and other function blocks in highly integrated SoCs. And in recent years, you can also add microcontrollers (MCUs) to the list; while they don't typically include a standalone embedded Read more...

Case Study: Digital Signal Processing Library Development Enables Effective Customer Deployments

The prodigious transistor budgets delivered by modern semiconductor processes enable designers to create powerful processor cores and chips. However, this silicon potential will be for naught if it can't easily be harnessed by algorithm developers. Consider the non-trivial die area and development time consumed by a processor core, along with the notable competitive differentiation that can be accrued by its effective utilization. Clearly, the ease by which coders can gain robust access to Read more...

CrossCore Embedded Studio: Analog Devices Gives Eclipse a Go

Analog Devices becomes the latest semiconductor manufacturer to standardize on the increasingly pervasive Eclipse open-source IDE (integrated development environment) and extensible plug-in system with the CrossCore Embedded Studio software suite for C++ and assembly language-based software development, which the company officially unveiled last month at the DESIGN East conference. Particularly attentive readers may recall that this isn't the first time we've heard about CCES (CrossCore Read more...

Adapteva's Epiphany Floating Point Processor Core: A Leading-Edge Lithography May Finally Open Doors

Cost- and power consumption-sensitive digital signal processing applications tend to leverage fixed point processors, for a common fundamental reason: fixed-point processor cores are substantially less complex than their floating-point counterparts, leading to reductions in transistor count and silicon area. Yet fixed-point processing comes with trade-offs of its own; code development, for example, is complicated by the need to comprehend the potential for overflow, underflow and round-off Read more...

Xilinx's Vivado: An "All-Programmable" Toolset for Today and Tomorrow

Over the past 25 years, programmable logic devices have grown in capacity and capability through lithography advancements and the integration of specialized functional blocks. First were dedicated memory arrays derived from the same SRAM used to build logic cells. Next came dedicated-function logic blocks such as multiply-accumulate units (MACs), to accelerate digital signal processing and other math-intensive algorithms, along with the integration of high-performance transceivers to speed Read more...

Spansion's Speech Recognition Coprocessor: Flash Memory with On-Board Search-Logic Power

Spansion is a name that's probably familiar to many of you, as a supplier of nonvolatile memories. You might be wondering, therefore, what the company's doing gracing the pages of InsideDSP. Well, hold that thought! Spansion was originally founded in 1993 as a joint venture of AMD and Fujitsu, and named FASL (Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited). AMD took over full control of FASL in 2003, renamed it Spansion LLC in 2004 and spun it out as a standalone corporate entity at the end of 2005. Read more...

QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core

"There's been at least one DSP core in every chip that Qualcomm's ever made." Qualcomm senior director of product management Rick Maule used this statement as his lead-in to an explanation of the latest-generation QDSP6 architecture, specifically where it fits in the company lengthy DSP development heritage. QDSP6, if you haven't already figured out, refers to Qualcomm's sixth-generation DSP core architecture and is also commonly referred to by its "Hexagon" marketing moniker. The sixth- Read more...