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| Texas Instruments Introduces Triple-Core ‘C6474 |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 10/15/2008
 On October 14, 2008, Texas Instruments introduced a high-performance multi-core DSP, the TMS320C6474 that is intended for use in computationally demanding applications such as communications infrastructure, video surveillance, and medical imaging. The chip features three 1 GHz ‘C64x+ cores, each with its own L1 data and program cache, along with 3 MBytes of aggregate (not shared) L2 cache. As shown in Figure 1, the chip also contains a Viterbi accelerator and turbo decoding accelerator along with a DDR interface, an antenna interface, an Ethernet port, and a McBSP serial port. The chip is fabbed in a 65 nm process and costs $225 in 1K quantities. TI is also offering an evaluation module that contains two ‘C6474 chips for $1,995.
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| Percello Puts Cellular Femtocell Baseband on a Chip |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 10/15/2008
 Fabless semiconductor start-up Percello, is hoping to find success in the UMTS (cellular) femtocell market by offering a highly integrated SoC for baseband processing. Today, femtocell baseband processing is typically handled by a combination of processors and FPGAs, but Percello believes that the potential for high volumes means that a cheaper, simpler solution is needed. The company’s initial product, the PRC6000 baseband chip, is designed to serve as a standalone femtocell processor and as a subsystem element for a residential gateway. The chip will be fabbed in a 65 nm process and tape-out is expected by the end of this year, with initial samples becoming available in the first quarter of 2009. Pricing has not been disclosed, though Percello claims that its chip price will be a key competitive advantage relative to DSP-plus-FPGA or SDR silicon-based solutions.
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| PolyCore Tools Designed to Ease Multicore Communications |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 8/20/2008
 As computational requirements go up and fab processes increasingly bump up against inconvenient physical limitations, multicore solutions are becoming more attractive. The problem is that no one wants to program them, because there are lots of challenges associated with implementing applications on multiple cores. One challenge lies in handling inter-core communications.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Power Nomads |
By Jeff Bier, 8/20/2008
You see them at trade shows, in seminars, in airports—sometimes even in your own office building. They pace a room’s perimeter and scan its walls, eyes perpetually roving from floor to midline. They sneak behind counters and crawl under tables and thrust their hands into dark and cobwebby corners. Who are these people? And what do they want?
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| HP Licenses Imaging IP for Camera Phones |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 6/18/2008
 Late last year Hewlett Packard announced that it was exiting the digital camera market, citing a lack of growth in that business sector. But just because HP has quit the camera business doesn’t mean it’s abandoning all of its digital camera technologies; the image processing algorithms originally developed for HP’s digital cameras will now be incorporated into cell phones, enabling users to create high-quality prints from pictures taken with camera phones.
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| 3DLabs Aims Massively Parallel Chips at Portable Multimedia |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 4/23/2008
 When people talk about massively parallel, multicore chips, they’re usually talking about chips for high-performance line-powered applications, like WiMAX base stations or desktop video processing. But 3DLabs is headed in a different direction. The fabless chip company offers a massively parallel media processor, the DMS-02, which the company says is a perfect fit for portable multimedia devices with demanding video and audio processing requirements—such as high-end cellular handsets and portable media players. According to 3DLabs, the chip is in full production and costs $40 in small (1K) quantities. The company is currently shipping chips to initial customers, including a video surveillance equipment vendor, Grandeye.
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| Hantro 8190 Will Bring YouTube to Cell Phones |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 3/19/2008
 A few months ago, video codec vendor On2 announced its acquisition of Hantro, a company that offers licensable video codec accelerators and software. At the Mobile World Congress in February, On2 unveiled the first offspring from the marriage—the Hantro 8190 licensable silicon IP core.
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| Stretch Announces Second-generation Software Configurable Processor |
By Jennifer White & Jeff Bier, 3/14/2007
 On March 5, Stretch, Inc. announced its second-generation software configurable processor family, the S6000, and two initial chips. The S6000, like the previous-generation S5000 family, features a RISC processor core with a reconfigurable compute fabric embedded within the processor datapath.
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