TI jumps DSP family range to 100Mips

Electronic News, Feb 19, 1996

Houston, Tex.--Already a fixture in the wireless communications market, Texas Instruments' 16-bit, fixed-point C54x digital signal processing family will get a boost later this year when the first devices are manufactured in 0.35 and 0.25-micron process technology--boosting performance to the 66- 80- and 100Mips range.

What's more, TI is adding a new member to the DSP family, the TMS320LC548, with large on-chip RAM that facilitates applications such as digital cellular bases stations, wired and wireless telephones, mobile radios and multifunction line cards in local area networks.

Current devices in the C54x architecture range from 40-50Mips. The C548, though, will be introduced at 66Mips as the result of being manufactured in a 0.35-micron process. The C548, like other devices in the C54x family, will migrate to 0.25-micron, four-layer-metal technology.

Jim Larimer, TI's DSP fixed point applications manager, said the additional processing power will make a big difference in applications such as a GSM cellular basestation. Whereas a GSM basestation currently requires 30-35Mips for a single duplex channel, a 100Mips fixed-point DSP could provide three full-duplex channels for voice encode/decode, equalization and echo cancellation. Even at 66Mips speeds, two full duplex speeds are possible.

Likewise, the more powerful C54x devices will be able to tackle previously distributed tasks in applications such as multifunction telephony line cards in LANs. A 100Mips DSP would be able to integrate multimedia and telephony tasks such as V.34, digital simultaneous voice data (DSVD), full duplex speakerphone, FM and wavetable synthesis, 3D sound and other algorithms, according to Mr. Larimer.

The 66Mips C548, meanwhile, attempts to support a wider variety of applications. The new DSP, will initially sample in early 3Q 1996, with volume production planned for 4Q.

To some degree, the C548 targets applications similar to Analog Devices' 2181 DSP, which also features a large on-chip SRAM. But TI is planning to position the C548 as enabling a range of reconfigurable systems with the 32K words of on-chip SRAM and 8M-word address space for programs. In addition, the C548 sports two high buffered serial ports and one time-division multiplexed serial port.

Mr. Larimer said the 32K words of SRAM are essential to reconfigurable systems.