Nearly all new ASIC and SOC designs incorporating digital audio employ some form of programmable DSP to run the audio codecs.  General-purpose control processors can implement audio codecs with a sufficiently fast clock. However, they are not the most efficient engines for running audio codecs, and almost always use more energy to deliver real-time, multi-channel audio.

DSPs generally run audio codecs more efficiently than do general-purpose processors because they have features that accelerate the … Read More → "Put Low-Power, Low-Overhead, High-Fidelity Digital Sound in Your Next ASIC or SOC"

DSP software developers have traditionally converted key performance-critical portions of their algorithms to assembly language because that was considered the only way to achieve high performance when using a DSP core. Every DSP architecture is different – optimized for a different type of data throughput challenge – and programmers need to understand each underlying DSP architecture in order to optimize the code manually using assembly coding techniques.  Thus specialized knowledge is required to achieve effective results.

Read More → "Cut DSP Development Time – Get High Performance From C, No Assembly Required"

The choice of hardware-interconnection mechanisms among processor blocks in an SOC affects communication performance and silicon cost. The default on-chip communications choice for most ASIC and SOC design teams is the global bus or a bus hierarchy, however this choice automatically incurs many performance and design problems.

There are other choices that may be more appropriate for today’s nanometer ASIC and SOC designs. These choices match well with communications concepts frequently used by … Read More → "Get Your ASICs and SoCs Off the Bus!"

Texas Instruments continues to expand the performance of its processors with the new C6A816x Integra™ DSP+ARM processor generation, featuring the highest performing floating- and fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP) on the market today.

Texas Instruments’ (TI) Integra™ DSP+ARM devices combine a digital signal processor (DSP) and an ARM® processor, enabling developers to create applications best suited for executing a combination of signal processing tasks and microprocessor (MPU) tasks. This paper reviews the benefits of combining ARM processing with DSP processing in a single chip, including increased real-time performance, improved system flexibility and reduced system cost and power. Integra DSP+ARM processors are useful for applications such as power protection systems, industrial control, machine vision and … Read More → "Maximizing the Power of ARM with DSP"

Serial-wire brings robust debugging capability to low-cost micorocontrollers.