Analog Devices Inc. today plans to introduce the first digital signal processor to use the company’s TigerSharc DSP architecture.
The TigerSharc architecture, which ADI introduced last year, is optimized for data, image and voice processing and is targeted at large-scale and multichannel signal processing tasks in wireless base stations and Internet remote access server equipment.
The ADSP-TS001 integrates 6 megabits of synchronous random access memory, a fixed- and floating-point core, four bi-directional link ports, a 64-bit external port, 14 direct memory access channels and 128 registers.
The DSP is capable of processing 8-, 16- and 32-bit fixed-point and floating-point data types on a single chip, which will be critical to third-generation wireless systems, said ADI.
For example, ADI said voice coder and channel coder protocols are developed around 16-bit data types, while many telecom applications employ line equalization and echo cancellation techniques built around 32-bit floating-point data processing to boost signal quality and system performance. Meanwhile, the 8-bit native support is used for image processing for which it is more straightforward and cost-effective to represent the red, green and blue components of the signal with 8-bit data types.
“The chip’s ability to accelerate the processing based on the data type is like a built-in turbo charger,” said Robert Conrad, Analog Devices’ vice president of DSP Products. “In a telecommunications application for example, the same chip can scale the number of channels depending on whether it is transmitting many voice channels per chip or a few video channels per chip.”
For large-scale applications that require clusters of DSPs, ADI also has integrated its patented link port technology, which enables direct chip-to-chip connections without the need for complex external circuitry.
In addition, the TigerSharc platform provides a flexible development environment that supports both C and assembly programming, said ADI. TigerSharc features C-compiler tools that achieve up to 70-percent compiler efficiency.
The ADSP-TS001 processes 1.2 billion multiply accumulates (MACs) per second for 16-bit fixed-point processing. The ADSP-TS001 also can calculate 900 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS), which ADI said is three times the performance of the nearest competing DSP.
Analog Devices said it plans to release the ADSP-TS001 general sampling, software tools and hardware tools during the first quarter, with full production of the ADSP-TS001 scheduled for the second half of next year.
