In December Texas Instruments announced the TCI6487 multi-core baseband processor. The device will be manufactured in a 65 nm process and is intended mainly for GSM, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX basestation applications.

As multimedia systems grow in complexity, system and SoC developers increasingly rely on vendors to provide “solutions”—combinations of hardware and software that together implement complete multimedia functions such as audio and video compression and decompression. Vendors have responded by offering a growing number of such solutions.

Multithreaded programming isn't a new idea, but it's currently experiencing a major upswing in attention. That's because many multi-core chip vendors are currently pushing multithreading as the best way to harness their chips' processing horsepower. 

But a recent influential paper by Dr. Edward Lee argues that multi-threaded application programming, as commonly practiced, is a flawed methodology that invites a range of nasty, hard-to-identify bugs.

Compiling digital signal processing application code is not a push-button process—at least, not unless you're willing to settle for inefficient code. Signal processing algorithms (and the processors commonly used to run them) have specialized characteristics, and compilers usually can't generate efficient code for them without some level of programmer intervention.

With the new year approaching, many marketing managers are readying new-product roll-outs for 2007.  One vital element of a product introduction is the briefing presentation–the pitch that will introduce customers, editors, and analysts to the new offering.

How can you capture the attention of your audience and make your introduction stand out from the hundreds of others slated for early 2007? 

Here at BDTI, we just wrapped up a new study comparing DSP-oriented FPGAs to DSP processors.  Like many DSP engineers, I started the project extremely familiar with processors and relatively new to FPGAs. I've ended it with a deeper understanding of the many surprising differences between the two technologies.  I'm not talking about performance differences—though our benchmark results do show some big ones. No, what I'm talking about is how data that's straightforward to obtain for processors can be downright squirrelly for FPGAs.

Many high-performance DSP and general-purpose processors are equipped with SIMD single-instruction, multiple data) hardware and instructions. SIMD enables processors to execute a single instruction (say, an addition) on multiple independent sets of data in parallel, producing multiple independent results.

This week, Analog Devices introduced four new members of its Blackfin processor family: the ADSP-BF549, ‘BF548, ‘BF544, and ‘BF542.  These new devices will operate at clock speeds of up to 600 MHz and are intended mainly for automotive applications that incorporate signal processing, such as digital broadcast radio receivers, navigation systems, and rear-seat entertainment equipment.