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| Texas Instruments Focuses on Low Power with New Chips |
By BDTI, 7/23/2008
 In
July, Texas Instruments announced that it will offer new low-power
variants of four of its key DSP processor product lines: the ’C55x, the
’C64x+, the ’C67x, and OMAP. The new family members are intended to
span a wide range of low-power applications, from those that are
line-powered but require low heat dissipation (such as home
entertainment gear, where cooling fans are considered too noisy)
to those that require a week or more of battery life (such as portable
medical monitoring devices).
(More)
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| Freescale Introduces Basestation Baseband Accelerator |
By BDTI, 7/23/2008
 Last
month Freescale introduced a new baseband accelerator chip for wireless
infrastructure equipment. The chip is tailored to the high data
rates and computational demands of emerging wireless standards,
including 3G-LTE, TDD-LTE, HSPA+, and WiMAX. The accelerator, called
the MSBA8100, is designed to run alongside Freescale’s MSC8144,
which is a high-performance quad-core DSP processor chip.
Together, the two chips are intended to provide a full baseband
solution and potentially eliminate the need for FPGA- or ASIC-based
acceleration.
(More)
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| Case Study: Building Credibility for Multimedia Solutions |
By BDTI, 7/23/2008
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. This
has created a new challenge for system and SoC developers: vendors’
claims about the functionality and performance of their solutions are
difficult to interpret and often impossible to compare.
(More)
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| Application Processor – Say What? |
By Jeff Bier, 7/23/2008
Recently I wrote about how the term “DSP” seems to be losing its cachet, and people are starting to use terms that are more application-specific. Instead of “DSP processors,” there are now “digital signal controllers,” “multimedia processors,” and “video processors,” for example. These terms are fine with me. But there’s one that really annoys me: “application processor.”
(More)
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| Eutecus Moves Video Analytics into Surveillance Cameras |
By BDTI, 6/18/2008
 Digital video has become a killer app for signal processing technologies, and video analytics—that is, analysis of digital video to identify specific events or characteristics—is quickly becoming a significant driver in digital video. Video analytics isn’t one of those solutions looking for a problem; it has an enormous range of potential applications, both commercial (such as intelligent surveillance and traffic monitoring) and military (such as target detection and tracking).
(More)
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| HP Licenses Imaging IP for Camera Phones |
By BDTI, 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.
(More)
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| Case Study: Creating Super-efficient Embedded Software |
By BDTI, 6/18/2008
Digital signal processing algorithms are increasingly important in an expanding range of embedded systems. For example, compute-intensive multimedia functions are finding their way into applications from toys to appliances to telephones.
(More)
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Risky Business |
By Jeff Bier, 6/18/2008
If you were getting ready to buy a new high-end camcorder or a new car, chances are you’d spend some time reading independent reviews. Maybe you’d pick up a copy of Consumer Reports or Road and Track. Perhaps you’d scan Amazon.com for user evaluations. Whatever. The point is, you probably wouldn’t just make your choice based on the vendor’s marketing claims, right?
(More)
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| Xilinx Debuts Virtex-5 FXT, Expands SXT Platform |
By BDTI, 5/28/2008
 At the end of March, Xilinx announced availability of the first two members of its Virtex-5 FXT platform, the FX30T and FX70T. The Virtex-5 FXT platform is geared towards serial communications and embedded applications, and joins three other Virtex-5 platforms: the LX, which is intended for logic-intensive applications; the LXT, which targets logic and serial communications; and the SXT, which is intended for serial communications and DSP. (The “T” in the platform name indicates that the chips contain transceivers.) Target applications for the new FXT chips include video-over-IP, wireless base stations, and other high-performance applications.
(More)
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| Altera Jumps to 40 nm with Stratix IV |
By BDTI, 5/28/2008
 Not to be outdone by rival Xilinx, Altera has made a major announcement of its own. In mid-May, Altera unveiled its next-generation high-performance FPGA family, the Stratix IV, and announced that the family will be fabbed in a 40 nm TSMC process. Xilinx beat Altera to the 65 nm node with its Virtex-5 chips, but with this announcement, it appears that Altera will leapfrog Xilinx to 40 nm—assuming that Xilinx doesn’t come out with 40 nm chips before the Stratix IV is expected to start sampling, towards the end of this year.
(More)
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