Last month Atmel announced the AVR32, a 32-bit microprocessor core with signal-processing-oriented features.  The AVR32 targets computationally intensive, battery-powered applications such as consumer entertainment devices.  Atmel plans to announce AVR32-based chips later this year; the core will also be available through Atmel’s ASIC-design services.

The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective is to test it with a knowledgeable, critical, and responsive audience. A test audience can also help ensure that the content is correct, relevant, and appropriate for the intended audience. Just as important, a test audience can help presenters gauge the clarity, appeal, and impact of their pitch. After all, superb technical content serves no purpose if the audience loses interest a few minutes into the presentation.

My colleagues and I at BDTI believe very strongly in benchmarks. We’ve been developing and implementing signal processing benchmarks for over a decade, and we know that good benchmarks play an essential role in evaluating processing engines. You can see, then, why we get bent out of shape when benchmarks are used misleadingly. This happens pretty regularly in vendor marketing materials, but we’ve also seen it in training classes and technical articles.

Last month Infineon introduced two new TriCore-based processors, the TC1161 and TC1162. These new chips join Infineon’s TC1xxx family of chips targeting motor control and other computationally demanding industrial signal processing applications. (Chips targeting this space are often called digital signal controllers, or DSCs.)

Energy consumption is a chief concern for many digital signal processing applications, especially for portable applications where battery life is paramount. In these applications, an accurate understanding of energy consumption is critical to processor selection and to system design. Unfortunately, many obstacles hinder comparisons of processors’ energy consumption.

Last week TI unveiled its first “DaVinci”-branded processors, the TMS320DM6443 and the TMS320DM6446. These processors target home entertainment, surveillance, and other video applications. The two chips are similar in many respects. Each chip contains a 300 MHz ARM9E general-purpose processor core, a 600 MHz ‘C64x+ DSP core, and connectivity peripherals such as USB and Ethernet ports.

This month Analog Devices introduced the ADSP-21375, the newest member of its SHARC floating-point DSP family. The new chip will operate at 266 MHz and be priced at $5 in high volumes  ($7.95 in 10K quantities). It will target consumer audio applications and cost-sensitive application areas traditionally dominated by low cost fixed-point DSPs, including industrial, automotive, medical and instrumentation applications.

Signal processing is becoming important in an increasingly broad range of embedded systems. As signal processing workloads become more widespread, these workloads are increasingly assigned to embedded processors that were not designed with signal processing in mind. Because these processors were not designed for signal processing tasks, the processors’ software development tools often lack critical features needed for signal processing software development.