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 got a particularly challenging design on your hands.

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.

Last month's edition of InsideDSP included the article "NVIDIA and Qualcomm ARM Up Against Competitors," which discussed (among other things) NVIDIA's upcoming five-core Kal-El (i.e. Tegra 3) SoC. Tegra 3 combines four ARM Cortex-A9 cores built out of conventional 40 nm transistors and a fifth Cortex-A9 constructed from low-leakage (albeit switching speed-limited) circuits.

NVIDIA and Qualcomm, two leading ARM licensees and SoC implementers for high volume consumer electronics systems, are now sampling their latest-generation mobile application processors. Both companies recently published documentation describing the unique design techniques and features of their SoCs.

A Tegra Quintuplet

Today's SoCs typically include a variety of specialized co-processors and accelerators. In some cases, the chip supplier provides its customers with the ability to program these specialized engines. In other cases, the chip company does all of the programming, and provides API-level interfaces for application developers.

In a recent consulting assignment, my colleagues and I at BDTI evaluated a semiconductor manufacturer's new-product introduction presentation and provided recommendations for improving it.  One of our key recommendations was to include data supporting major claims regarding the new product's advantages.  This may seem like an obvious idea, but after sitting through hundreds of briefings, I find that it's an idea that is not widely embraced among technical marketing people.

Analog Devices and Texas Instruments both recently unveiled cost-optimized DSPs within one day of each other. Perhaps the seeming near-synchronicity was an innocent fluke. Then again, perhaps one vendor got an inkling of the other's announcement plans and decided that a near-coincident introduction would be an appropriate response. The exact circumstances don't particularly matter; the longstanding highly charged competitive climate between the two companies is fiscally and otherwise beneficial to their customers and to the industry at large.