Houston (September 10, 2001) -- Delivering the highest-performing DSPs to date, Texas Instruments Inc announced that customers have begun designing products with the first devices based on its TMS320C64x DSP core, which combines the highest performance and lowest power consumption of any available digital signal processor (DSP). Operating at up to 600 MHz and consuming less than 1W of power, the new devices deliver up to ten times the performance in wireless and broadband applications and up to 15 times the performance in advanced imaging applications, with one third the power dissipation of other single core DSPs.

"TI continues to accelerate the pace of technological development," said Tom Engibous, TI chairman, president and chief executive officer. "These three new programmable DSPs set the industry benchmark at 600 MHz and are among TI's first products developed in 0.13 micron copper process technology. The C64x DSPs have broad capabilities and especially will enable wireless multimedia communications and the full convergence of video, voice and data on all types of broadband networks. Plus, they use just a fraction of the power of today's most advanced DSPs, and our development tools enable the creation of new applications at unprecedented speed. The technology mantra is still 'more, better, faster, cheaper, with less power consumption.' The new C64x DSPs deliver on those demands."

Since the introduction of the TMS320C6414, TMS320C6415 and TMS320C6416 DSPs in February of this year, the new C64x devices have gained broad-based industry acceptance. Dozens of customers and more than 20 third-party developers are designing these devices into advanced imaging, wireless and broadband systems. Customers adopting the new C64x DSPs include: AltiGen Communications, Artel Video Systems, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, Scopus Network Technologies, and Spectel. Third parties developing with C64x include: A.T.E.M.E., Commetrex, Imagine Technology LLC, Motorola, Pentek, Spectrum Signal Processing and Wintegra.

"It is refreshing to see a company deliver the performance they promised at the time of their new product announcement. TI announced their C64x DSPs at 600 MHz and they are actually shipping parts at that speed, making the family the highest-performing, single-core programmable DSPs available today," said Will Strauss, president of DSP market watcher Forward Concepts. "OEMs will be encouraged that TI does not take a 'one size fits all' approach with its products, since they are offering three versions of the new DSP, each tailored for a specific class of applications."

TMS320C6416 DSPs Deliver 10X More Performance for Wireless Infrastructure

The three devices are targeted for specific applications. The C6416 DSP, the most highly integrated of the three, features the on-board coprocessors needed to handle the dense channel capacity of third-generation (3G) wireless base stations. The low power dissipation and exceptional channel density of the C6416 DSP enable wireless infrastructure developers to meet the demanding challenges of third-generation services with the lowest possible cooling requirements.

The C6416 DSP builds on the performance of TI's TMS320C6203 DSP, the industry's previous performance leader which is already being used for base station designs by 80 percent of the top 3G wireless OEMs worldwide. A single 600-MHz C6416 DSP can process up to 350 voice channels at 12.2 kb/s, compared to 74 with the 300-MHz C6203 DSP, and 35 data channels at data rates up to 384 kb/s, compared to a single channel with the C6203 DSP. The DSP accomplishes this task through its inherent processing power and through a Viterbi coprocessor (VCP) dedicated to voice processing, and turbo coprocessor (TCP) for data processing. The C6416 DSP is the only device available today that integrates these essential coprocessors on the chip.

TMS320C6415 DSPs Deliver More Channel Density for Broadband and Imaging

Customers designing advanced broadband communications infrastructure and imaging systems are using the C6415 DSP, which incorporates the same on-chip peripherals as the C6416 DSP but not the wireless-specific coprocessors.

"With the 600 MHz processing power of TI's C6415 DSP, and peripherals such as a PCI interface, we are able to quadruple our port density per chip on our VoIP boards as well as accomplish up to 64 channels of voice," said Richard DeSoto, sales and marketing senior vice president, AltiGen. "TI has shown its leadership in the DSP field by continuing to deliver breakthrough products in a timely manner. TI perfectly meets our demands and allows us to stay one step ahead of our competitors in the VoIP market."

The C6415 DSP also provides developers of media gateways and advanced imaging applications the performance and interfaces required to handle multi-channel MPEG-4 video. The DSP can perform one channel of MPEG-4 video encoding, one channel of MPEG-4 video decoding, and one channel of MPEG-2 video decoding, and still have 50 percent headroom remaining for multi-channel voice and data coding. The DSP also features 33-MHz, 32-bit PCI and HPI32 host connectivity for control of interprocessor communications. In addition, the processor supports 50-MHz Utopia Level II ATM connectivity.

"With the delivery of the TMS320C6415, we are able to increase DSP performance by 4x for our MPEG2 decoder and rate reducer applications and still have 50% headroom left over for other tasks such as performance monitoring and communication," said Israel Goldshide, R&D project manager at Scopus Network Technologies. "By delivering the highest performing DSPs and connecting us with TI's third party network, we can continue developing leading edge video products and push them to market quicker than ever."

For developers of systems that do not require dedicated DSP network connectivity, the C6414 DSP provides all of the performance of the 600-MHz C64x core, as well as a host of industry-standard interfaces. Its 64-channel enhanced direct memory access (EDMA) controller delivers unmatched I/O efficiency that manages data transfer from system memory at gigabytes per second. In addition, three multi-channel buffered serial ports (McBSPs) each support 128 time-division multiplex (TDM) channels as well as AC97 and IIS audio interfaces.

High-Performance DSP - Just One Part of an Optimized System

TI provides optimized system solutions along with industry leading DSP and analog parts, software, support, tools, development boards and market knowledge, allowing OEMs to increase revenue by simplifying development and speeding time to market. In addition, TI customers who are designing applications with C64x DSPs can leverage TI digital signal processing support to decrease product development time.

The C64x DSPs are supported by TI's eXpressDSP Real-Time Software Technology, including the Code Composer Studio v2 Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the industry's most sophisticated DSP IDE and the DSP/BIOS real-time kernel. TI's library of DSP and imaging software modules, best-in-class software development tools and eXpressDSP-compliant products from the DSP industry's largest third party network all add up to faster time to market for the designers of broadband and imaging applications. OEMs have begun designs with these three new programmable DSPs, which are software compatible with other members of the TMS320C62x DSP platform, allowing developers to port the object code they have developed for earlier designs to the new devices saving valuable design time. The new DSPs are easy to program, and use the C64x DSP compiler that optimizes more than 80 percent of hand-coded assembly.

Availability

TI is scheduled to offer 400, 500, and 600 MHz versions of all three C64x devices. The C6414 DSP pricing begins at $95, C6415 DSP pricing begins at $105, and C6416 pricing begins at $115 in 10,000 unit quantities, all are packaged in 532-lead BGA packages, and are available today. The C64x development boards and complete suite of eXpressDSP development tools are also available today. Technical documentation is available on the Internet at www.dspvillage.ti.com/c64xpromo1

The semiconductor industry has become so sophisticated that architecture alone won’t generally take products simply beyond an incremental improvement. In most cases, a jump to a true next generation requires chip suppliers to also take advantage of process and fabrication technologies to make any such dramatic breakthroughs.

Such a technology advance is behind TI’s announcement of the general availability of the first parts in its next-generation C6000 family. In fact, comments Greg Delagi, VP and manager of worldwide DSP activities, these are the first standard products based on the firm’s 0.13 copper micron process technology; TI disclosed information about the core technology early last year, has been sampling them quietly but is now ready for general distribution. The devices run at 600 MHz, and TI claims to be the only firm shipping DSPs that run at that speed. That rate is double of the previous generation C62X, which started shipping in 4Q99, and the Motorola Starcore 8101 (also at 300 MHz), which according to TI started shipping late last year. The firm also adds that several other firms have announced 300-MHz devices, but they aren’t yet in silicon; among them are the Blackfin from Analog Devices, the StarPro from Agere and the Starcore 8102.

Of the three devices that make up this announcement, the C6416 ($115, qty 10,000) is the most highly integrated and is targeted at the 3G wireless infrastructure. It includes two hardware accelerators: a Viterbi Coprocessor (VCP) that supports more than 500 voice channels at 8k bps along with programmable decoder parameters for constraint length, code rate and frame length. The second accelerator is a Turbo Coprocessor (TCP) that supports 35 data channels at 384k bps with minimal processor delay and whose programmable parameters include mode, rate and frame length. Dropping these hardware accelerators but keeping the high-end chips Utopia functionality is the C6415 ($105, OEM qty). Utopia refers to a "Universal Test and Operation PHY Interface for ATM" with 8-bit transmit and receive operations up to 50 MHz and a user-defined cell format up to 64 bytes. This selection of functions makes that device suited for other broadband and imaging systems. Finally, the $95 C6414 drops Utopia, but its feature set makes it a good choice for systems that don’t require dedicated network connectivity.

As for benchmarks, TI says that when compared to the previous generation C62XX devices, the new chips boost motion estimation by 15x, morphology by 12x and a DCT by 4x. You can also expect a similar 4x boost in FFT and filter algorithms. Next consider the number of channels of wireless voice coding (12.2k bps AMR voice): the older C6203 at its peak of 300 MHz handles 74 channels, the new 600-MHz C6414 or 15 without the accelerator handle 134, while the C6416 more comes close to tripling that capability at 360 channels. The improvement in wireless data coding is even more dramatic: when comparing the ability to handle channels of 384k bps data, the C6203 (at 300 MHz) can work with 0.9 channels, the C6414/15 roughly double that number, while the C6416 skyrockets the number to 35.

TI is also proud of its PBC, Performance Based Compiler. It allows engineers to position a tradeoff between cycles and code size to optimize programs for their requirements and cost constraints.

And while this announcement makes no mention of floating-point devices, TI’s Delagi remarks that such devices are on the roadmap and users can look for that capability in later announcements.

Data sheet: dspvillage.ti.com/docs/catalog/dspdetails/
dspplatformdetails.jhtml?navigationID=61&familyID=132