InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Time is Money

Experienced engineers know that a comprehensive technical specification is a prerequisite for all but the most trivial projects. Without a solid spec, it is difficult to know how to begin a project, let alone deliver a high-quality product. Yet specifications are rarely complete in the sense that they rarely capture every minute element of the product’s ultimate behavior and performance. Indeed, attempting to specify every detail is usually futile: changing customer requirements, unforeseen Read more...

DSP Group Announces One-Size-Fits-All Core

In August, DSP Group announced CedarDSPCore, a family of licensable DSP cores that targets a wide range of applications. The CedarDSPCore family has two unusual features that lend it noteworthy flexibility. First, these cores use “computation clusters” rather than a traditional data path. Each “cluster” contains two multiply-accumulate units, an ALU, a shifter, and a register file. Licensees can choose from cores with one, two, or four clusters, depending on the performance requirements of Read more...

Notes From the TI Developer Conference

At last month's TI Developer Conference, TI convened a panel discussion featuring some of its top management. This panel addressed a broad range of topics such as TI's plans for its architectures and the changing competitive landscape. One of the most interesting topics discussed was the growing competition between Intel and TI. Intel has made no secret of its intent to wrest the market for handheld wireless devices from TI. Although TI holds the lead in cell phones, Intel has established Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—FPGAs Crash the Party

These days, digital signal processing enables everything from satellites to engine controllers. With their decades of experience, one would expect DSP processor vendors to have a lock on these applications. All they have to do is belly up to the all-you-can-eat buffet, right? Not if FPGA vendors can help it. Until fairly recently, FPGAs lacked the capacity to implement demanding DSP algorithms—and they were perceived as being too expensive and power-hungry to compete with DSPs anyway. One Read more...

DSP Group Steps Up to New Platform

Last month the IP licensing division of DSP Group introduced its first platform offering, XpertTeak. The fully synthesizable XpertTeak platform consists of the dual-MAC TeakDSPCore core, data and program memory, and peripherals like timers, buffered serial ports, and a DMA controller. This platform strikes a middle ground between DSP Group's existing offerings of stand-alone DSP cores and application-specific combinations of DSP cores, software, memory, and peripherals. In another first for Read more...

TI Upgrades Its Development Infrastructure

This May, TI introduced its XDS560 emulator. The key new feature of this emulator is its speed: according to TI, the XDS560 supports data transfer rates of over two Mbytes per second, compared to about 20 Kbytes per second for its predecessor, the XDS510. This higher data bandwidth will be particularly useful for video-processing applications, as it will enable real-time monitoring of video data. BDTI's experience in developing video applications suggests that real-time monitoring is a rare Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Frankenstein’s Camera

Is the lowly camera the focal point for a revolution in convergence devices? In the past few months consumer electronics manufacturers have shipped a camcorder with a built-in MP3 player and voice recorder; a PDA with a built-in camera and an MP3 player; and a cell phone with (you guessed it) a built-in camera and voice recorder. Are these devices harbingers of a golden age of consumer electronics? Or are they like Frankenstein's monster: technically brilliant but disastrous in practice? In Read more...

ARM11's DSP Strengths Revealed

ARM unveiled the ARM11, the first core to implement the ARMv6 instruction set, at the recent Embedded Processor Forum. The ARM11 contains a number of features that should prove particularly useful for DSP applications. The most prominent of these features are the new dual-16-bit multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions. DSP algorithms typically make heavy use of MAC operations, so these instructions will likely give the ARM11 a major performance boost over its single-MAC predecessors. The ARM11 Read more...

Infineon Joins StarCore Partnership

On June 18th, Agere, Motorola, and Infineon announced that they would be teaming up to form a new company, StarCore LLC. StarCore LLC will be based on the earlier Agere/Motorola joint design center, StarCore, but with some notable differences. One difference is that, unlike the earlier alliance, StarCore LLC will be a distinct business entity separate from its parent companies. All three partners will have equal ownership in the new company, which will be headquartered in Austin, Texas. The Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—I Want My VoD

Over the years, futurists have made technology predictions that seem ridiculous in retrospect. Even brilliant, serious thinkers promised us hover cars and space colonies that have yet to pan out; what went wrong? In many cases, the technology was available, but there was no business case for the predicted advances. Sure, we can colonize the moon—if somebody is willing to foot the bill. Consider the fate of streaming video: we have the technologies to make high-quality, on-demand video a Read more...