Considering how ubiquitous and indispensible they are today, it’s amazing to think that digital cellular phones were a novelty 15 years ago.  In the mid-1990s, digital cellular handsets were just beginning to be deployed in large volumes.  At that time, these handsets were becoming the “killer app” for digital signal processors.  Chip suppliers such as Texas Instruments (TI) and AT&T Microelectronics ramped up their DSP processor development efforts to compete for design wins in this growing market. 

Analog Devices (ADI) has expanded its Blackfin family of DSP-centric embedded processors with a new low-cost family member, the ADSP-BF592. The processor delivers a respectable 800 MMACS (million multiply accumulate cycles per second) for around $3.  The trend is clear:  ever-tinier processors can take on demanding DSP applications in segments ranging from consumer electronics to medical to automotive.

In September, ARM announced its latest high-performance processor core–the long-rumored Cortex-A15, code-named Eagle.  The announcement contained few details, but did set out some aggressive performance targets, and also made it clear that ARM’s ambitions extend beyond hand-held devices to cellular base-stations, networking equipment, servers, and other performance-hungry infrastructure applications.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I call “embedded vision” technology—that is, the use of computer vision technology in embedded systems.  Similar to the way that wireless communication has become pervasive over the past 10 years, I believe that embedded vision technology will be very widely deployed in the next 10 years.

Recently, I asked the CEO of a large semiconductor company, “How important are small companies as partners and suppliers of your firm?”  His response was immediate and unequivocal:  “Extremely important.  By definition, small companies are more innovative and quicker than large ones.  We need to harness that for our success.”

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person—or which book, or whatever—you’d like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?

For 25 years, DSP processor vendors have benefited from a very powerful secret weapon: extremely talented, hard-working customers.  These customers understood their applications and algorithms inside and out.  They were experts on processor instruction sets.  They studied every nuance of microarchitecture, from pipelines to memory bank structures.  And they spent countless weeks applying that knowledge to create dazzlingly efficient implementations of their applications on DSP processors.

Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and hardware designers require more than just chips from their chip vendors. They demand reliable, easy-to-use software development tools, OS support, middleware and application software components, I/O support, and more—right out of the box. To win design-ins, a chip vendor must deliver much more than just processing performance on a board.