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| And Stellaris Makes Four: TI Acquires Luminary Micro, Expands MCU Lineup |
By BDTI, 6/17/2009
 Earlier this month Texas Instruments announced that it had acquired Luminary Micro, a start-up fabless semiconductor vendor that sold ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers. Luminary’s “Stellaris” family of Cortex-M3 MCUs has been on the market since 2006. Current Stellaris chips operate at up to 50 MHz; TI expects to sample 80 and 100 MHz chips later this year. Stellaris chip prices range from $1.00 - $7.00 in 10K quantities. TI has also announced Stellaris-based development kits starting at $99.
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| New Details Emerge on NXP’s CoolFlux BSP Core |
By BDTI, 6/17/2009
 This month NXP has unveiled more details on its new licensable core, the CoolFlux BSP, which targets low-power communications baseband processing. The core is based on the similarly named CoolFlux DSP, which was designed for use in low-power audio applications and introduced in 2004. Relative to the older core, NXP says that the CoolFlux BSP has been enhanced to increase its performance in baseband processing while retaining a small footprint and low power.
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| Perfecting Presentations for Greater Impact |
By BDTI, 6/17/2009
The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective is to test it with a knowledgeable, critical, and responsive audience. A test audience can also help ensure that the content is correct, relevant, and appropriate for the intended audience. Just as important, a test audience can help presenters gauge the clarity, appeal, and impact of their pitch. After all, superb technical content serves no purpose if the audience loses interest a few minutes into the presentation.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Avoiding Accidental Stealth Mode |
By Jeff Bier, 6/17/2009
Recently I realized that I hadn’t heard a peep out of a certain embedded processor vendor in quite some time. Usually my colleagues and I at BDTI hear from processor vendors on a regular basis for new product briefings, but it had been almost a year since we’d heard anything from this particular vendor. The lack of communication made me wonder – what are they up to? Are they still developing new products? I called one of my contacts there to see if I could get a pulse. It was hard to get a direct answer, but what it boiled down to is this: the company had been spooked by the economic downturn and the associated revenue drop, and had decided to pull in its horns and cut its promotional activities to near zero.
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| APTX Expands Apt-X Audio Codec Lineup, Sells Hardware Division |
By BDTI, 5/20/2009
 At the recent AES convention in Munich, audio technology house APTX (formerly APT, Audio Processing Technology) announced that it is developing a new, scalable variant of its “apt-X” audio compression algorithm. The new codec is called “apt-X Scalable,” and is intended to be used as a single-codec solution in products that process a range of audio inputs, such as mobile devices that include voice, music, ringtones, and other forms of audio.
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| Is Your Development Kit Ready for Customers? |
By BDTI, 5/20/2009
Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and integrators require more than just hardware 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 development boards, software development tools, and software components in a variety of increasingly sophisticated and diverse development kits.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—The Getting-the-Box Experience |
By Jeff Bier, 5/20/2009
Whenever I talk to chip and tool vendors about the ease-of-use of their products, they invariably brag about how much time they’ve invested in ensuring a good “out-of-the-box experience.” What they mean is that, when a customer first starts using one of their products (say, a development kit), the customer finds it easy to get the tool up and running. This is important, and it’s hard to do well. We here at BDTI often run into glitches in this area: things like missing files, documentation that’s out of sync with the software or hardware, bugs in the install program, etc. But, worthy topic though it is, the typical out-of-the-box experience is not the subject of today’s rant.
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| Microchip Offers High-Performance DSP Library for PIC32 |
By BDTI, 4/22/2009
This Article was updated on April 27, 2009.
This month Microchip announced a “high-performance” software library of common DSP functions for its 32-bit microcontroller family, the PIC32. This library replaces Microchip’s earlier DSP library for the PIC32, which was quietly released last October. The library includes 16- and 32-bit vector math routines, 16-bit filters, and 16- and 32-bit FFTs.
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| BDTI Releases Benchmark Results for Toshiba's Venezia Platform |
By BDTI, 4/22/2009
 BDTI recently completed a benchmark analysis of the Toshiba MeP “Media embedded Processor” core and “IVC2” SIMD coprocessor, both of which are used in Toshiba’s Venezia mobile multimedia platform.
The MeP is a licensable core that is intended to be used as a building block in multi-core, multimedia-oriented SoCs, typically with multiple MeP cores on a chip. Each MeP core can be customized with specialized instructions, co-processors, and memory sizes.
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