It's now very clear that computer vision is becoming a mass-market technology. Modern, practical computer vision (or, "embedded vision," as I prefer to call it) is rapidly becoming essential in cars, for example, where it enables a host of valuable safety features. In smartphones, computer vision enables better photographs and image-based search. And new smart-home devices use vision to perform functions such as messaging you when your kid gets home, or when an unknown person arrives.

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.

Back in early 2010, Xilinx first began discussing its "Extensible Processing Platform" concept, followed by a formal introduction of the Zynq-7000 product family one year later (with initial sampling another year after that). Zynq-7000 wasn't the first processor-plus-programmable logic combo chip; both Xilinx and competitors like Altera had previously developed such devices.

With the MM3101, launched at the January 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, silicon IP supplier CEVA for the first time provided a processor core with instructions and other features specifically tailored for computer vision algorithms.  (The precursor MM2000 and MM3000 were focused predominantly on encoding and decoding images and video).

In many applications of digital signal processing – such as speech recognition and computer vision – the essential objective is to distinguish objects of interest, such as words or faces. This can be very challenging in real-world situations where objects of interest are distorted (e.g., a person is speaking with an accent, or a face is turned at an angle from the camera) or obscured (for example, a voice is competing with background noise, or a face is partially covered by a hand).

Portable electronics devices are incorporating increasingly sophisticated multimedia capabilities, while at the same time striving to meet tough size, weight, battery life and cost requirements. Recently, a BDTI client launched a design for a new portable multimedia system requiring billions of floating-point operations per second and low input-to-output latency, and single-digit power consumption to enable compact and fan-less system operation.

At January's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Cadence showed that has picked up the baton and continued the pace of acquired company Tensilica by announcing the eleventh generation of the Xtensa configurable processor architecture. First unveiled in 1999, Xtensa has received evolutionary advancements on a roughly two year cycle since that time; in late 2013, for example, InsideDSP covered the Xtensa 10 product release.

Massively parallel processor supplier Tilera is a company that InsideDSP has kept an eye on for nearly a decade now, stretching back to BDTI's benchmarking of the company's first-generation TILE architecture in its 64-core form (see sidebar "Company, Architecture and Product Line Background").

If you frequently travel across many time zones, you've probably had the unsettling experience of waking at an odd hour and being uncertain about where exactly you are. If you're like me, your instinctive solution to this confusion is to turn on a light and look around. Instantly, you recognize that you're in a hotel room. A few more visual clues (sometimes requiring a peek through the window) and suddenly you know where you are.

As applications become more complex, and processors become more powerful, system developers increasingly rely on off-the-shelf software components to enable rapid and efficient application development. This is particularly true in digital signal processing, where application developers expect to have access to libraries of optimized building-block functions to speed their work.