TI targets mission critical systems with latest floating point DSP
The TMS320C66x family includes includes the TMS320C6670 radio SoC, a 1.2 GHz four core device with 15 accelerators for software defined radios (SDRs), public safety and emerging broadband radio systems. The four 1GHz and 1.2GHz programmable DSP cores provide 153.8 GMACs or 76.8 GFLOPs alongside the dedicated accelerators.
The C6670 includes a multistandard Bit Rate Coprocessor (BCP) as well as other coprocessors that accelerate physical layer processing for LTE, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX, substantially increasing system capacity and performance with low latency. This helps to develop multistandard communications-centric solutions for the mission critical industry.
The C66x multicore DSPs provide a path for parallel processing in order to meet the FFT processing time requirements of radar developers. Once FFT performance is met within a radar system, developers can use the other C66x DSP cores to perform pre and/or post processing of the signals or other tasks in the system. “The defense sensor processing market has an almost endless thirst for computational power often with the need for low power devices,” said Bill Lundgren, CEO at US system developer Gedae. “The high bandwidth data on-chip data, available on-chip memory, flexibility of a MIMD multicore and massive available compute bandwidth make this family of multicore DSPs from TI very appealing for mission critical applications.”
The DSPs offer mission critical developers a large collection of visual processing algorithms from industry leading third parties and partners, as well as the ability to easily develop their own algorithms with TI’s Vision Library. TI’s Vision Library includes over 40 common kernels which serve as the essential building blocks of most video analytic algorithms. In addition, TI offers developers advanced codecs, including JPEG 2000, for high image quality, low latency and no inter-frame dependencies which are necessary for many government-regulated applications.
TI also sees opportunities for the devices in flight control, routing, servers, video processing networks and security.
Significant updates to TI’s multicore software kit and toolset, include Linux software, optimised libraries, support for the OpenMP programming model and a freemulticore software development kit (MCSDK). Development and evaluation of the C66x multicore devices comes from low cost EVMs available from TI such as the TMDSEVM6678L for $399. The EVM includes a free Code Composer Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and suite of application/demo codes to allow programmers to quickly come up to speed on the new platform.
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