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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)

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)

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)

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)