TI to Extend Its Developer Software Approach, DSPs to Video Imaging

Electronic News, Jan 22, 2001 by Tom Murphy

Takes full-service approach to lucrative market

Jumping from its success in the embedded space, Texas Instruments Inc. will use its software-to-sell-hardware approach in the lucrative video imaging market.

TI (nyse: TXN), based in Houston, will introduce today a software development kit that is intended to give system developers a leg up in integrating the company's floating point DSP family into systems designed for surveillance, industrial control, machine vision and medical imaging. The market is now being served by a number of different processors including general-purpose microprocessors, ASICs, video processors and DSPs, according to Pradeep Bardia, product marketing representative for TI.

Using the developer kit approach that has reaped design-win success for TI in the consumer products market, the company hopes to convince designers that it is much easier to incorporate its C6000 family of DSPs into video imaging systems because it will provide important software additions. Those additions would include such functions as compression routines and DSP algorithms. That will save the developer time and money compared to either developing those software functions in-house or finding them from a third party, Bardia said.

"Most ideas incorporate DSPs into the MPEG market," said Will Strauss, analyst for Forward Concepts Inc., Tempe, Ariz. "This is the other video market, which is smaller, but it requires very high performance and it demands very high ASPs."

Unlike the cell phone market, which TI dominates and which only commands a few dollars per processor, the video imaging market looks to be a very profitable one, according to Strauss.

"And TI wants to expand their presence there and to make it easier to do," Strauss said. "In a sense this is an extension of their religion which says 'software sells chips.'"

Bardia said TI's C6000 family has the processing power, the channel density and the cost-effectiveness to handle complex video-imaging applications such as the video-on-demand services now being proposed by Blockbuster Entertainment, or applications that require minute detail such as CAT scans and magnetic resonance imaging.

"From our experience in broadband and DSL chipsets, we have demonstrated that the C6000 has two key requirements that satisfy our customers' key care-abouts in this market," Bardia said. "Those are real-time performance and software programmability."

Of course, TI will have to sway designers who have previously adopted Motorola's PowerPC chip or a DSP solution from Analog Devices Inc., Strauss said. Not that those players have controlling market shares; however, they do have some momentum there.

In addition to the C6200 family, TI is expected to announce a new line called the C6400 family, that will feature improved performance, Bardia said.

TI said that its imaging development kit is available now and offers both hardware and software.