DSP houses not giving up - Semiconductors

Electronic News, May 6, 2002 by Gale Morrison

Embedded microprocessor providers are feverishly working to bring DSP capability onto their cores through extensible instructions and other design engineering feats. Further developments at last week's Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose prove that DSP IP specialists aren't taking that lying down.

First came a particularly eye-catching introduction from Lenslet Labs Ltd. of Ramat Gan, Israel. Lenslet discussed the architecture of what it calls a reconfigurable, optics-based DSP engine. Its ODSPE, Lenslet said, can accomplish one trillion DSP operations per second.

The core of the ODSPE is based on an optical architecture that performs vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) in a single machine cycle; it's also programmable. Lenslet said that the native VMM operation enables the implementation of DSP algorithms simply and efficiently, at the highest level, using the natural representation of vectors and matrices. The first product will be called Enlight 256.

Component programming changes can be made at the application level or at the task level (within an application), or for values within a given task. Lenslet said this flexibility allows the ODSPE to meet current and future computational requirements, reduces the component count for new subsystems and cuts product life-cycle cost.

A viram Sariel, founder and CEO of Lenslet, said that his company has been inundated with calls from interested partners since he first discussed the technology last October. Lenslet closed a $26 million funding round in November of 2000, with Goldman Sachs, Walden, JK&B Capital, Star Ventures and eXseed Technology all chipping in.

Unfortunately, Lenslet has not manufactured the part yet--not surprising, considering its immense complexity. Ron Levy, director of marketing and business development at Lenslet, flew to San Jose for EPF and other Valley business. He gave out some details, but all in all the company is keeping much of this information close to its vest.

"Lenslet does not need a fab," Levy said. "I can tell you the subassemblies will be manufactured by a third party, and system integration will be done in our labs in Israel."

The optical core is composed of an input array of 256 vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL), a spatial light modulator (SLM) composed of 256 by 256 matrix elements, and a photo detector array (PDA) of 256 detectors.

Lenslet has developed a library of functions already translated into the matrix format and a set of tools for transform library development. The library and the tools are provided with the ODSPE to accelerate code development.

Meanwhile, Chip Wrights Inc. took to the show to introduce a member of its new visual signal processor family. Chip Wrights has developed and patented a microprocessor core comprised of a RISC processor with an array of DSP vector processing units.

Chip Wrights said it sees these processors in both efficient, low transistor count implementations for very cost-sensitive applications such as cameras and in high-performance applications such as video transcoders.

The first device available is the CW4011 ViSP, a fully C programmable SOC that offers real-time video, main level, main profile MPEG-2 encoding at cost and power levels suitable for battery-operated, portable digital image capture devices.

The CW4011's CWv8 processor core includes a vector array of fully pipelined DSP units that support 32 MACs per cycle.

The CW4011 ViSP will be offered at 200MHz, 233MHz and 266MHz. Samples are available today and production volumes will be available in the third quarter, the company said. The 208-pin device is available in a plastic quad flat pack (PQFP) or BGA package, with pricing for the 200MHz part at less than $20 each in quantities of 10,000 units.