InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Case Study: “Your Mileage May Vary:” Creating Reliable Comparisons of IP Cores

An attractive attribute of licensable processor cores is the flexibility chip designers have to adapt these cores to their chosen fabrication process, cell library, tool flow, logic synthesis goals and other conditions.  In other words, chip designers can tune the core to the needs of a particular application and to their preferred chip design methodology.  An unfortunate side effect of this flexibility is that it can be extremely difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons between Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Power Nomads

You see them at trade shows, in seminars, in airports—sometimes even in your own office building.  They pace a room’s perimeter and scan its walls, eyes perpetually roving from floor to midline. They sneak behind counters and crawl under tables and thrust their hands into dark and cobwebby corners.  Who are these people?  And what do they want? They are the Laptop Power Nomads, and they are searching for the elusive wall outlet.  I count myself among them. I’ve often found myself in Read more...

Texas Instruments Focuses on Low Power with New Chips

In July, Texas Instruments announced that it will offer new low-power variants of four of its key DSP processor product lines: the ’C55x, the ’C64x+, the ’C67x, and OMAP. The new family members are intended to span a wide range of low-power applications, from those that are line-powered but require low heat dissipation (such as home entertainment gear, where cooling fans are considered too noisy)  to those that require a week or more of battery life (such as portable medical monitoring devices Read more...

Freescale Introduces Basestation Baseband Accelerator

Last month Freescale introduced a new baseband accelerator chip for wireless infrastructure equipment.  The chip is tailored to the high data rates and computational demands of emerging wireless standards, including 3G-LTE, TDD-LTE, HSPA+, and WiMAX. The accelerator, called the MSBA8100, is designed to run alongside Freescale’s MSC8144, which is a high-performance quad-core DSP processor chip.  Together, the two chips are intended to provide a full baseband solution and potentially eliminate Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Application Processor—Say What?

Recently I wrote about how the term “DSP” seems to be losing its cachet, and people are starting to use terms that are more application-specific. Instead of “DSP processors,” there are now “digital signal controllers,”  “multimedia processors,” and “video processors,” for example. These terms are fine with me.  But there’s one that really annoys me: “application processor.” “Application processor” is the term used for the processors in cell phones that do stuff other than the actual cell Read more...

Eutecus Moves Video Analytics into Surveillance Cameras

Digital video has become a killer app for signal processing technologies, and video analytics—that is, analysis of digital video to identify specific events or characteristics—is quickly becoming a significant driver in digital video.  Video analytics isn’t one of those solutions looking for a problem; it has an enormous range of potential applications, both commercial (such as intelligent surveillance and traffic monitoring) and military (such as target detection and tracking). Like most Read more...

HP Licenses Imaging IP for Camera Phones

Late last year Hewlett Packard announced that it was exiting the digital camera market, citing a lack of growth in that business sector.  But just because HP has quit the camera business doesn’t mean it’s abandoning all of its digital camera technologies; the image processing algorithms originally developed for HP’s digital cameras will now be incorporated into cell phones, enabling users to create high-quality prints from pictures taken with camera phones. HP has provided a license of its Read more...

Case Study: Creating Super-efficient Embedded Software

Digital signal processing algorithms are increasingly important in an expanding range of embedded systems. For example, compute-intensive multimedia functions are finding their way into applications from toys to appliances to telephones. As a result, a growing number of system developers face a daunting challenge:  delivering implementations of DSP algorithms that are sufficiently optimized to meet demanding MIPS, memory, and cost requirements while also meeting aggressive schedules.  DSP Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Risky Business

If you were getting ready to buy a new high-end camcorder or a new car, chances are you’d spend some time reading independent reviews. Maybe you’d pick up a copy of Consumer Reports or Road and Track. Perhaps you’d scan Amazon.com for user evaluations.  Whatever. The point is, you probably wouldn’t just make your choice based on the vendor’s marketing claims, right?   Yet that’s exactly what some design engineers do when they choose a processing engine. My colleagues at BDTI and I were Read more...

Xilinx Debuts Virtex-5 FXT, Expands SXT Platform

At the end of March, Xilinx announced availability of the first two members of its Virtex-5 FXT platform, the FX30T and FX70T. The Virtex-5 FXT platform is geared towards serial communications and embedded applications, and joins three other Virtex-5 platforms: the LX, which is intended for logic-intensive applications; the LXT, which targets logic and serial communications; and the SXT, which is intended for serial communications and DSP. (The “T” in the platform name indicates that the Read more...