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)

Eutecus Moves Video Analytics into Surveillance Cameras By BDTI, 6/18/2008 Digital video has become a killer app for signal processing technologies, and video analytics—that is, analysis of digital video to identify specific events or characteristics—is quickly becoming a significant driver in digital video. Video analytics isn’t one of those solutions looking for a problem; it has an enormous range of potential applications, both commercial (such as intelligent surveillance and traffic monitoring) and military (such as target detection and tracking). (More)

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. (More)

Case Study: Creating Super-efficient Embedded Software By BDTI, 6/18/2008 Digital signal processing algorithms are increasingly important in an expanding range of embedded systems. For example, compute-intensive multimedia functions are finding their way into applications from toys to appliances to telephones. (More)

Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Risky Business By Jeff Bier, 6/18/2008 If you were getting ready to buy a new high-end camcorder or a new car, chances are you’d spend some time reading independent reviews. Maybe you’d pick up a copy of Consumer Reports or Road and Track. Perhaps you’d scan Amazon.com for user evaluations.  Whatever. The point is, you probably wouldn’t just make your choice based on the vendor’s marketing claims, right? (More)