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| National Instruments Introduces Single-Board RIO |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
 At NI Week in August, National Instruments introduced a new product line, a set of eight boards that are intended as complete, off-the-shelf computing-plus-I/O solutions for medical, mechatronic, and industrial applications, among others. The boards are called “Single-Board RIOs” (RIO is short for “reconfigurable I/O”), and each board contains a PowerPC CPU, a Xilinx Spartan FPGA, and analog and digital I/O. The I/O channels are connected to the FPGA, enabling the user to customize timing and I/O signal processing.
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| Case Study: “Your Mileage May Vary:” Creating Reliable Comparisons of IP Cores |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
An attractive attribute of licensable processor cores is the flexibility chip designers have to adapt these cores to their chosen fabrication process, cell library, tool flow, logic synthesis goals and other conditions. In other words, chip designers can tune the core to the needs of a particular application and to their preferred chip design methodology. An unfortunate side effect of this flexibility is that it can be extremely difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons between licensable cores.
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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).
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—“DSP” becomes ubiquitous, passé |
By Jeff Bier, 5/28/2008
When my partners and I founded BDTI back in the early 90’s, “DSP” was in the process of becoming both a hot technology and a widely used abbreviation. The abbreviation meant two distinct things: digital signal processing, and digital signal processor. You could usually figure out which one was meant by the context, but in some ways they were interchangeable—if you were doing digital signal processing, you were probably doing it on a digital signal processor.
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| 3DLabs Aims Massively Parallel Chips at Portable Multimedia |
By BDTI, 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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| IBM’s Cell for Embedded? |
By BDTI, 4/23/2008
 IBM’s multicore Cell processor has garnered a lot of media attention over the last couple of years, as the multicore approach itself has become something of a juggernaut. BDTI recently investigated the current state of Cell products, and whether the architecture is likely to get significant traction in embedded applications.
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| Case Study: Where Does Your Processing Engine Fit In? |
By BDTI, 4/23/2008
Developing a new signal processing engine is expensive and risky, particularly for a small start-up or for an established company moving into an unfamiliar market. There are good reasons to take that risk: signal processing has become ubiquitous in a wide range of application areas, and offers the potential for high revenues. The flip side is that the market is already densely populated with all kinds of signal processing engines: single-core chips, multi-core chips, massively parallel processors, DSP-enhanced FPGAs, SoCs, etc. Depending on the specific target market, a new processor may find itself going head-to-head with some or all of these classes of competitor.
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