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ARC Introduces Configurable Video Subsystems By BDTI, 8/22/2007 Adding to its growing portfolio of licensable silicon IP subsystems, ARC has announced five configurable video processing subsystems. The subsystems range from the smallest-size AV 402V to the highest-performance AV 417V, and support multi-standard video encoding and decoding at resolutions ranging from CIF to D1. (More)

TI Introduces Floating-Point Digital Signal Controller By BDTI, 8/22/2007 Texas Instruments recently introduced what it calls "the first floating-point digital signal controller (DSC)." (The term DSC is relatively new in the industry; it refers to a low-cost embedded processor that combines DSP and microcontroller characteristics.) The new chip family, the TMS320F2833x, is based on the company's mature 32-bit fixed-point microcontroller architecture, the 'C28x, but adds a floating-point unit that can perform (among other operations) one 32x32-bit floating-point multiplication per cycle. (More)

Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—All Video Apps are Not Alike By Jeff Bier, 8/22/2007 Pretty much everyone agrees that digital video has become a killer app for embedded processing engines. But “video” can mean different things to different people; the term encompasses a diverse set of applications with very different requirements. A processor you’d use for video playback in a low-cost cell phone, for example, isn’t going to cut it for an HDTV set and vice versa. (More)

How Video Compression Works By Jeff Bier, 8/15/2007 Digital video compression/decompression algorithms (codecs) are at the heart of many modern video products, from DVD players to multimedia jukeboxes to video-capable cell phones. In this article, we explain the operation and characteristics of video codecs and the demands codecs make on processors. (More)