InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Memo to CEOs: The Money Value of Time

The "time value of money" – the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow – is an intuitive concept deeply entrenched in our business culture. The "money value of time" also gets a lot of attention; it's generally recognized, for example, that getting a new product out ahead of competitors' offerings often defines the difference between success and failure. Lately, though, I've been flabbergasted by the extent to which some of the largest and most respected technology Read more...

Case Study: How to Make a Really Attention-Getting Demo

Back in August 2011, Jeff Bier's editorial "How to Make a Really Annoying Demo" neatly summarized the common attributes of poorly developed and executed product demonstrations that he'd auditioned over the years. Recently, Bier (and company) had the opportunity to show the ability to "practice what is preached," in the context of a demo developed in partnership with Analog Devices for that company's newly introduced BF60x Blackfin SoCs (see "Analog Devices' Latest Blackfin Proliferations Get 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Are DSP Engineers Becoming Extinct?

Lately, it seems that DSP engineers are becoming scarce.  Is this phenomenon limited to my local neighborhood?  I don’t know.  But whether it’s a local or a global phenomenon, I find it worrisome.  DSP engineers have been critical to innovation in the electronics industry, and will continue to be critical for many years.  If there aren’t many DSP engineers around, innovation will suffer. To understand why, let’s start with the question: “What is a DSP engineer?”  But before we tackle that 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Unleashing Mobile Multimedia Applications, Part 2

Last month I made the case that multimedia applications are central to the value of smart phones and tablets. I also pointed out that it is difficult for app developers to utilize the multimedia processing power of these devices, which mainly resides in specialized coprocessors. These coprocessors are difficult for application developers to use for two reasons.  First, while the vast majority of application processors use ARM CPUs, there’s a great deal of diversity in coprocessors—but app Read more...

Case Study: Developing Attention-Getting Demos

Your company just developed the most powerful chip ever.  Your job: to get customers interested in using it in their system designs.  Challenging?  You bet.  As fantastic as its capabilities may be, your little slab of black plastic looks pretty much just like those of your competitors.  Yes, the numbers on your brochure look great.  But, let’s face it, they’re just numbers on paper.  How exciting can they be? To capture customers’ attention and engage their imaginations, what you really need Read more...

Picochip and Mindspeed: Former Competitors Unite to Address Wireless Spectrum Needs

The dearth of available wireless spectrum throughout the world, notably in the United States, is one of technology's hottest topics. It's driving network management policies such as bandwidth throttling, data usage caps, and blocks of particular ports, protocols and services, any or all of which (depending on which side of the debate you're on) are overdue and necessary, or overly heavy-handed and fiscally motivated. It's prompting the FCC to prod terrestrial television broadcasters into Read more...

CEVA's XC4000 DSP Core: The Communications Focus Expands Even More

Technology advances ever onward over time, and in fact its pace has accelerated since Jack Kilby's initial integrated circuit demonstration in 1958. So it is that, while CEVA's DSP core licensees are demonstrating SoCs based on the company's current-generation CEVA-XC323 (see "Picochip and Mindspeed: Former Competitors Unite to Address Wireless Spectrum Needs" in this issue of InsideDSP), CEVA is simultaneously unveiling its next-generation core, the XC4000 (Figure 1). Figure 1. CEVA builds Read more...