TI, in turnabout, offers MWave boards and API

Electronic News, Nov 2, 1992 by Stuart Zipper

HOUSTON--Texas Instruments, which under its MWave deal with IBM had been expected solely to develop a digital signal processor and program interfaces optimized for multimedia, instead will debut a line of boards, a standardized applications program interface and device drivers for plug-and-play use in desktop computers.

TI said its change of course was influenced by major market resistance from computer manufacturers and software vendors reluctant to build their own multimedia boards or write software using DSP-specific code. When the TI-IBM deal was announced, with software to be written by Intermetrics (EN, March 23), little more than a new DSP had been envisioned.

In addition to IBM, TI said it has signed up Samsung and Goldstar as customers for the new MWave boards, and is in negotiations with Compaq. Although IBM will initially use the TI boards, its future plans were said to include a more proprietary board and eventually integration of the TI multimedia circuit onto computer motherboards.

TI's sales thrust is aimed at OEMs, said Julie Gallagher, MWave marketing manager. While TI has no plans to offer the boards directly into the aftermarket, it has begun negotiations with various add-in board vendors and resellers who would sell the boards under their private labels.

The TI boards are powered by a new fixed-point DSP with 17-mip throughput, essentially the part envisioned in the MWave pact. The DSP, designated TMS320M500, features a new core optimized for multimedia use, a 24-bit instruction word and a 16-bit data word.

The 320M500, which operates at 59MHz, is not code compatible with any earlier TI DSP circuits. Other features include seven serial interfaces to accommodate multimedia multi-tasking, each with its own DMA channel, plus a PC bus interface.

Software includes an embedded DSP operating system plus a resource and application interface manager. Included are drivers to perform all communications between MWave and Windows applications, with OS/2 versions due in about 180 days.

Available immediately are drivers for music synthesis, audio compression, text to speech, sound effects, AT command set-compatible modems, CD-XA and Redbook Audio, Group 3 fax, microphones for voice input and telephone handset I/O, answering machines and speaker phones. TI said it will sell the new DSP alone to any customers who want it, at $35 in 10,000-piece quantities, but the company expects most sales to be of boards.

"What 99 per cent of the OEMs have said is, "This is great, where do I get the boards," Ms. Gallagher said. "The board-level stuff and drivers are all something we really didn't even do until after we signed the alliance (with IBM), because that's what everybody said they needed."

Introduced initially were a $99 board supporting 8- and 16-bit sound, text-to-speech and JPEG still-frame single-image compression. $250 board adds telephony functions such as phone answering and speaker phone, plus V.22 and V.32 BIS compatibility. A board supporting full-motion video is scheduled for the second half of 1993.

Set for availability early next year is a developer's kit, priced at $995 and aimed at third-party software vendors planning to develope enduser applications running under MWave. A driver developer's kit for use by OEMs planning to write code for their own boards is slated for Q293.

Ms. Gallagher said TI has already signed up a handful of third-party software vendors. These include Lotus, which is porting its Notes program, plus Borland, WordPerfect, and FutureSoft, the company responsible for the terminal software used by Windows.

Before the MWave program, TI had been trying to convince such companies to write multimedia software using generic DSPs. "We've been trying to talk to ISVs for about two years," Ms. Gallagher said. "They've all just basically said no. The problem is everyone's been writing DSP code, but no ISV is going to sit there and write DSP code and tie himself to a single hardware platform."

She attributed the change in software company attitude to the standard interface of the MWave Manager program, which she called "everything you would need to integrate DSP type capability into applications without having to touch any of the DSP code or do anything hardware-specific."