InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—A Pain in the Procurement

In the last decade most companies in the electronics industry have invested significant efforts in streamlining their design, testing, and manufacturing processes. Time-to-market pressures are intensifying; engineers and technical support staff often work overtime to meet product deadlines.  But there’s one task that is still typically slower than molasses in winter—and that’s procurement. Ask nearly anyone who works for a medium- to large-sized tech company about their procurement process Read more...

Case Study: With Reduced Reporting, Product Announcements Must Really Pop

The economy is finally recovering—sort of—and a number of tech companies are planning long-delayed product launches. But over the last year, the technical trade press that covers these announcements has been decimated. There are a lot fewer tech reporters now, and those that remain are often struggling to cover unfamiliar tech areas. They’re overworked and understaffed, and they don’t have time to decipher unclear marketing messages. If you want your product announcement to get attention and Read more...

ARM Launches Cortex-A5 “Sparrow”

Last month ARM announced a 2 GHz dual-core implementation of the Cortex-A9 that targets high-performance embedded apps. This month ARM is announcing a new processor core: the Cortex-A5 “Sparrow.” Sparrow is intended for use in Internet-enabled consumer devices, particularly those with a user interface—such as cell phones, mobile audio devices, and digital picture frames. According to ARM, Sparrow is its smallest, most power-efficient Cortex core, and will initially target a 40LP process. Read more...

Synphony Synthesis Tool Takes MATLAB to RTL

High-level synthesis tools (i.e., tools that take high-level language code and generate an RTL-based hardware implementation) have been around a long time, but historically they have had limited success in the market. The primary problems have been that they have been hard to use and have generated relatively inefficient implementations.  But their potential advantages are compelling, particularly as applications become more complicated: in the best case they can reduce implementation time 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Creative Tools Key to DSP on MCUs

The beauty of digital signal processing is that it enables people to convert available processing power into cool new features, better performance, and lower power in their products. There are countless examples, including MP3 players, wireless communications of all kinds, medical imaging, and voice recognition. Microcontrollers historically haven’t had enough processing power to do much DSP, but that’s changing—today’s high-end microcontrollers offer DSP performance levels that were once Read more...

ARM Announces 2 GHz Dual-Core Cortex-A9

On September 21st ARM announced a new high-speed, hard macro implementation of the Cortex-A9 architecture, called “Osprey.”  (A hard macro is a physical implementation of an IP block in a specific process.) Osprey is a dual-core implementation of the Cortex-A9 and according to ARM, it will run at up to 2 GHz in a 40 nm (TSMC 40G) fabrication process.  Like other Cortex-A9 variants, Osprey includes a floating-point unit (FPU) and NEON SIMD signal processing unit for each core. ARM will offer Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—X86 Muscles Into Embedded Multicore

In 2004 my friend Nick Tredennick wrote an interesting article in which he made the case that the x86 architecture would ultimately dominate embedded applications.  At the time, I thought Nick’s argument was slightly loopy.  But I have to admit that I’m having second thoughts. These second thoughts have almost nothing to do with any snazzy new chips introduced by Intel, and everything to do with software development for multicore processors. This month Intel announced its acquisition of Read more...

Intrinsity, Samsung Announce Cortex-A8 “Hummingbird”

This month Intrinsity and Samsung jointly announced a new, highly optimized implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core, called “Hummingbird.” According to Samsung and Intrinsity, an initial Hummingbird sample has achieved 1 GHz in Samsung’s 45nm low-power process. The companies say that Hummingbird is both faster and lower power than other Cortex-A8 implementations, though as of this writing they have declined to provide power data. Samsung says that it is currently developing Hummingbird- Read more...

Case Study: Benchmarking PowerPoint Processors

Processor designers know that a cycle-accurate simulator can be used to benchmark a processor that has not yet been fabricated. But many designers don’t realize that it’s also possible to benchmark an idea for a processor, a processor that may exist only in PowerPoint slides—and that there are good reasons for doing so. As BDTI’s president Jeff Bier wrote in a recent column, BDTI has seen a number of cases in which a processor vendor used BDTI’s benchmarks on its fully-designed processor, Read more...