InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Unleashing Mobile Multimedia Applications

Smartphones and tablets are becoming ubiquitous.  According to DIGITIMES Research, global smartphone shipments reached 464 million in 2011.  And 63 million tablets were shipped in 2011, according to IDC.  That's over half a billion devices sold in one year, and few analysts doubt that these numbers will grow in 2012. Not only are these devices increasingly popular, but–at least based on my informal observations–people are spending more and more time using them.  That's no surprise, Read more...

Case Study: Chip Vendors, Walk a Mile in Your Customers’ Shoes

Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated.  Chips are getting more complicated.  And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger.  As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits.  Design engineers rely on these kits to quickly evaluate chips and prototype key portions of their systems. Clearly chip manufacturers recognize that development kits are important, and there are hundreds available.  But the quality of Read more...

Tensilica's HiFi 3 DSP Core: Audio Post-Processing Comes to the Fore

In the digital audio world, the second half of the '90s and a notable portion of the '00s were dominated by the "codec wars." Kicked off by MP3, which emerged in mid-1994, the battle was soon joined by a host of competitors; industry-standard follow-on AAC, Microsoft-developed WMA, RealNetworks-championed RealAudio, open-source favorite Ogg Vorbis, etc. And, from a surround sound standpoint, Dolby Digital was dominant in the DVD era, with DTS ascendant on the Blu-ray successor. Nowadays, Read more...

The CEVA-MM3101: An Imaging-Optimized DSP Core Swings for an Embedded Vision Home Run

As last summer's formation of the Embedded Vision Alliance suggests, the transition from computer-based intelligent image processing to more compact, cost-effective and energy-efficient embedded vision products is already well underway. CEVA, a company to date best known for its digital signal processing cores found in cellular baseband IC designs, hopes to harness this trend (and, in the process, expand its serviceable market footprint) with the CEVA-MM3101, its latest imaging-tailored Read more...

Lisa Su Departs Freescale Semiconductor for AMD

Last week, Freescale announced that senior vice president Lisa Su would be leaving the company for other opportunities. Shortly thereafter, AMD announced that Su would be joining AMD effective the end of this year as senior vice president and general manager of global business units.  [Editor’s Note:  We don’t normally report on personnel changes in InsideDSP, preferring to focus on technology and products.  We’re making an exception in this case, because this personnel move is likely to have Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Small Base Stations Finally Proliferate

By now, I’m sure you've read that mobile data demand is growing quite rapidly.  It's no surprise, really: We're increasingly reliant on our mobile devices—be they laptops, netbooks, tablets, or smartphones.  And the things we do with these devices increasingly require network access, whether it's access to the corporate VPN to collect email and trade presentation slides, access to the airline web site to change our flight reservation, or access to social networks and news sources to keep up Read more...

Case Study: Choosing the Right Benchmarks for the Job

As embedded processors and applications become increasingly complex, good benchmarks are more important than ever.  System designers need good benchmarks to judge whether a processor will meet the needs of their applications, and to make accurate comparisons among processors.  Processor developers need good benchmarks to assess how their processors stack up against the competition—and to prove their processors’ capabilities to customers. But what exactly comprises a good benchmark? One 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Using More Transistors to Save Energy

I’m frequently amazed by people who can take whatever random material happens to be in good supply and make something useful out of it. Consider this clever gentleman, for example, who made a solar water heater from beer bottles. These days, thanks to continuing advances in chip fabrication, one thing that’s in abundant supply is transistors. Over the past few years, quite a few chips with transistor counts over one billion have gone into production. Generally speaking, more transistors 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...