SAN JOSE, Calif. — Cradle Technologies Inc., Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. will separately take this week's Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Francisco to debut chips based on digital signal processor (DSP) technologies.
As expected, TI (Dallas, Texas) on Monday (March 7) announced it is delivering wireless digital baseband devices for cellular phones, based on its 65-nm CMOS process technology. TI dropped hints about the DSP-based product last month (see Feb. 11 story).
The announcement fulfills TI's commitment made one year ago when it disclosed details of the 65-nm process. TI's 65-nm process is planned for both 200- and 300-mm wafers, with qualified production expected in late 2005.
In a separate announcement, Freescale (Austin, Texas) announced two high-performance additions to the MSC711x family of DSPs, based on StarCore technology.
The new DSPs, the MSC7119 and MSC7118, are designed for voice-over-IP applications. The MSC7119 and MSC7118 increase the performance of Freescale's MSC711x family from 800 millions of multiply accumulates (MMACs) to 1200 MMACs at 300-MHz.
To enable higher-voice density system designs in the networking, VoIP and baseband markets, the MSC7119 and MSC7118 devices now enable 16-24 premium voice channels and 32-48 channels of G.711, allowing a single device to terminate a T1 or E1 connection, according to Freescale.
The MSC7119 also includes 10/100-BaseT Ethernet. The programmability of these DSPs also makes them attractive for the general-purpose market, according to Freescale.
Samples of the MSC7119 and MSC7118 are planned for Q2 2005, and production is planned for early Q3 2005. Suggested retail pricing for the MSC7118 and MSC7119 is expected to range from $33.00-to-$35.00, in 10,000 unit volumes.
Meanwhile, Cradle (Sunnyvale, Calif.), a supplier of multiprocessor DSPs, announced three products in its new CT3600 family for embedded applications.
The CT3600 product family is said to integrate up to sixteen loosely coupled SIMD 32-bit DSP engines, eight general-purpose CPUs, 144 programmable I/O pins and a three-tiered memory hierarchy system to accelerate and integrate multimedia infrastructure processing.
The product line features the CT3616, which can encode 16 real-time MPEG-4 channels (480fps) at SIF resolution, sixteen G.711 voice channels, perform a complete IP packet encapsulation (RTP/UDP) with a 10/100 Ethernet MAC and provide an integrated hard disk (IDE) or compact FLASH storage interface.
The CT3616 offers 24000 MMACs or 275MMACs per dollar. This is four times better than other programmable multimedia DSPs in the market today, according to the company.
The CT3616 device will be sampling in June 2005 and is priced as low as $72 in 10,000 quantities for the slowest speed grade. The other two CT3600 members will be sampling in Q305 and are priced as low as $40 in 10,000 quantities.
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