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| When the Left Hand Wrestles the Right |
By Jeff Bier, 6/29/2010
Recently, I asked the CEO of a large semiconductor company, “How important are small companies as partners and suppliers of your firm?” His response was immediate and unequivocal: “Extremely important. By definition, small companies are more innovative and quicker than large ones. We need to harness that for our success.”
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| Choose Your Desert Island Companion Wisely |
By BDTI, 6/29/2010
Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person—or which book, or whatever—you’d like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?
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| Xilinx Unveils High-Performance ARM-based CPU-FPGA Hybrid Platform |
By BDTI, 5/20/2010
 Xilinx recently unveiled a new chip architecture integrating an ARM processor with an FPGA fabric. This platform centers around a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor complex, including hardened memory interfaces and peripherals. The platform architecture, shown in Figure 1, is intended to behave like a CPU first and an FPGA second. Specifically, the CPU will boot independently—without requiring that the FPGA first be configured. Xilinx is targeting markets that require both complex software and high-performance data processing, such as automotive driver assistance, intelligent video surveillance, industrial automation, aerospace and defense, and next-generation wireless products.
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| Freescale Takes on Texas Instruments with Multi-Core DSP Line |
By BDTI, 5/20/2010
 Freescale has announced a new high-performance DSP product line, the MSC825x, incorporating up to six StarCore SC3850 DSP cores at up to 1 GHz. Unlike other high-performance DSPs introduced by Freescale in recent years—which were aimed almost exclusively at wireless infrastructure applications—the new chips target a range of performance-intensive applications, including medical, aerospace and defense, and test and measurement equipment. This will put the new chips in direct competition with Texas Instruments’ (TI’s) high-performance multi-core DSPs (the TMS320C647x family, based on the C64x+ architecture).
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—DSP Processors Must Adapt or Die |
By Jeff Bier, 5/20/2010
For 25 years, DSP processor vendors have benefited from a very powerful secret weapon: extremely talented, hard-working customers. These customers understood their applications and algorithms inside and out. They were experts on processor instruction sets. They studied every nuance of microarchitecture, from pipelines to memory bank structures. And they spent countless weeks applying that knowledge to create dazzlingly efficient implementations of their applications on DSP processors.
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| Case Study: Is Your Development Kit Ready for Customers? |
By BDTI, 5/20/2010
Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and hardware designers require more than just chips from their chip vendors. They demand reliable, easy-to-use software development tools, OS support, middleware and application software components, I/O support, and more—right out of the box. To win design-ins, a chip vendor must deliver much more than just processing performance on a board. Vendors are responding to this demand by packaging specialized boards, development tools, and software components into a variety of increasingly sophisticated and diverse development kits.
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| Analog Devices Introduces Lower-Cost SHARC Processors |
By BDTI, 4/21/2010
 Analog Devices, Inc (ADI) has announced new members of its floating-point SHARC processor family featuring lower prices and offering LQFP packages, which are easier to use in older, lower-cost manufacturing facilities. The new SHARC products target digital audio, industrial, automotive, and medical markets. New ADSP-2147x chips feature lower power than previous SHARC products, while ADSP-2148x parts feature high performance with greater integration.
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| CEVA Rolls Out New Programmable Multimedia IP Core for HD Video |
By BDTI, 4/21/2010
 CEVA recently announced its third-generation video processor IP offering. The CEVA-MM3000™ is a programmable subsystem which is designed to support video decode and encode using many video standards, including H.264, VC1, RealVideo and AVS at resolutions up to 1080p (1920×1080 resolution at 30 or 60 frames per second). The CEVA-MM3000 is designed for use in several classes of digital media products including smartphones, tablets, Blu-ray DVD players and set-top boxes.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—High-Level Synthesis Tools for FPGAs: A Disruptive Technology? |
By Jeff Bier, 4/21/2010
In 2002, BDTI published the first rigorous, independent benchmarking study comparing the signal processing capabilities of high-end FPGAs to those of high-performance DSP processors. We benchmarked both technologies on the same demanding, highly-parallelizable multi-channel wireless application, and we looked at how many channels could be supported on each chip and the corresponding cost per channel. We knew that FPGAs had begun to find use as high-end signal processing engines, but we were blown away by how much of a throughput advantage they actually had—the FPGAs we looked at achieved orders of magnitude higher throughput than the DSP chips on our benchmark.
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| Case Study: Reliable Benchmark Results Lead to Good Design Decisions |
By BDTI, 4/21/2010
To paraphrase business guru Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t design it.” In the world of embedding processing, processor developers and users alike rely on benchmarks to measure and assess the capabilities of embedded processors on their target applications. Benchmark results enable processor developers to understand where they stand in relation to their design targets and their competitors. And in order to build competitive product and get to market quickly, system and SoC designers need reliable benchmark results to gain insight into the relative capabilities of candidate processing engines and make design decisions with confidence.
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