Software Development

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...

Case Study: Maximizing DSP Software Performance on ARM Processors

A decade ago, ARM processors were mainly found in cell phones, disk drives, and few other specialized applications. These days, they seem to be everywhere, from microcontrollers to tablet PCs. During this same time period, digital signal processing (DSP) tasks such as multimedia and communications functions have also become increasingly common in a wide range of systems. Given these two trends, it's no surprise that there's been a big uptick in products using ARM processors to implement digital Read more...

New Freescale DSP Core Benchmarked By BDTI, Debuts In Macrocell Base Station SoC

After some five years of architecture definition work and several years of development, Freescale's new StarCore SC3900 DSP core will see its first silicon implementation next quarter in the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 processor for macrocell base station designs, unveiled last month at the Mobile World Congress conference. As mentioned last August in InsideDSP (see "Next-Generation Power Architecture-Based SoCs Embrace Advanced Lithography, Core Virtualization, SIMD Instruction Set"), Freescale Read more...

Medfield: Will Intel's Long-Standing x86-in-Smartphone Aspirations Finally be Fulfilled?

Intel has been striving to shoehorn the x86 CPU architecture into handheld communications and computing devices ever since the company began publicly discussing the Atom architecture in late 2007. First- and second-generation Atom-based CPUs and associated core logic chipsets found predominant success in netbooks. But Intel also targeted low-voltage and reduced-clock-speed variants (in some cases also swapping out internally developed graphics accelerators for PowerVR cores licensed from Read more...

Case Study: Create Space for New Features by Squeezing Code

Semiconductor memory is increasing in capacity and becoming more cost-effective all the time. Yet, plenty of deeply embedded applications still exist for which every spare byte of RAM or flash memory is a precious commodity, especially those leveraging on-SoC storage versus discrete components. Tack on a performance-constrained DSP, intentionally speed-hampered to minimize power consumption, and a limited-capacity battery coupled with a multi-day or -week operating life expectation, and you've Read more...

Texas Instruments Announcements Span the Processor Spectrum

Back in November 2010 at Electronica in Munich, Germany, Texas Instruments unveiled the TMS320C66x DSP family, then consisting of a quad-core communications SoC (the TMS320C6670) along with three pin-compatible conventional DSPs in two-, four- and eight-core variants (the TMS320C6672, TMS320C6674 and TMS320C6678), all based on the company's earlier-unveiled KeyStone architecture. At that same time, TI trumpeted its products' fixed- and floating-point performance results on the BDTI DSP Kernel Read more...

Microsoft Kinect SDK Released, Robotics Developer Studio Kit Enhanced

Embedded vision is a clear "poster child" for digital signal processing silicon and software technology, beginning with the algorithms employed in image capture (including exposure, color balance, lens aberration correction, etc) through edge detection and pattern matching, and extending all the way to frame analysis and response (motion tracking, for example). And Microsoft's Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 game console, which sold 10 million units in its first five months on the market ( Read more...

Start-Up Naratte Launches Novel Ultrasonic Near-Field Communications Solution

Near-field communications (NFC), which traces its heritage to radio-frequency identification (RFID), has lately been promoted as a way to enable mobile phones and other portable devices to serve as electronic wallets. Early examples of the technology, operating on the 13.56 MHz ISO/IEC 18000-3 air interface with transfer rates ranging from 106 kbps to 848 kbps, exist today in cellular handsets such as Google’s Nexus S, developed by Samsung and leveraging a NFC transceiver from NXP Read more...

Embedded Vision Alliance Forms to Catalyze Practical Applications of Computer Vision

A new industry association, the Embedded Vision Alliance, is being formed to help embedded system designers harness computer vision in their products.  BDTI, which has initiated the partnership, believes that computer vision—extracting meaning from images and video—is poised to proliferate into a wide range of applications in the next few years. The success of the Microsoft Kinect—which has become the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, selling 10 million units in its first Read more...

MathWorks Extends Code-Generation Capabilities Across its Tool Portfolio

The MathWorks—maker of MATLAB modeling environment—has launched a trio of new code-generation tools called MATLAB Coder, Simulink Coder, and Embedded Coder. With these automatic code-generation products, The MathWorks aims to eliminate the need for development teams to maintain parallel development efforts—modeling algorithms in MATLAB, for instance, while separately coding in C or C++ for embedded implementation. MATLAB users will get direct code-generation capability for the first time Read more...