Processors

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...

Xilinx Previews New Chips and Tools for Heterogeneous Processing

Back in early 2010, Xilinx first began discussing its "Extensible Processing Platform" concept, followed by a formal introduction of the Zynq-7000 product family one year later (with initial sampling another year after that). Zynq-7000 wasn't the first processor-plus-programmable logic combo chip; both Xilinx and competitors like Altera had previously developed such devices. But at the time it was unique in that it embedded a full-fledged processor subsystem, including a full peripheral set, 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...

Cadence Turns the Xtensa Architecture Up to Eleven*

At January's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Cadence showed that has picked up the baton and continued the pace of acquired company Tensilica by announcing the eleventh generation of the Xtensa configurable processor architecture. First unveiled in 1999, Xtensa has received evolutionary advancements on a roughly two year cycle since that time; in late 2013, for example, InsideDSP covered the Xtensa 10 product release. At the time, Cadence had also unveiled the fifth generation of its LX Read more...

EZchip Gets Up in ARMs

Massively parallel processor supplier Tilera is a company that InsideDSP has kept an eye on for nearly a decade now, stretching back to BDTI's benchmarking of the company's first-generation TILE architecture in its 64-core form (see sidebar "Company, Architecture and Product Line Background"). After an initial flurry of product releases, privately held Tilera grew uncharacteristically quiet over the next half-decade, focusing on rolling out the remainder of the TILE-Gx family, conserving its Read more...

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

As applications become more complex, and processors become more powerful, system developers increasingly rely on off-the-shelf software components to enable rapid and efficient application development. This is particularly true in digital signal processing, where application developers expect to have access to libraries of optimized building-block functions to speed their work. A leading SoC developer recently contracted BDTI to assist it in developing a comprehensive library of software Read more...