Adapteva's Epiphany Floating Point Processor Core: A Leading-Edge Lithography May Finally Open Doors

By _Inside DSP

September 6, 2012

Cost- and power consumption-sensitive digital signal processing applications tend to leverage fixed point processors, for a common fundamental reason: fixed-point processor cores are substantially less complex than their floating-point counterparts, leading to reductions in transistor count and silicon area. Yet fixed-point processing comes with trade-offs of its own; code development, for example, is complicated by the need to comprehend the potential for overflow, underflow and round-off errors. And floating-point processors also tend to support wider data words and are therefore inherently capable of higher dynamic range.

A floating-point digital signal processor is often preferable to its fixed-point counterpart, therefore, in traditional markets such as high-end audio and image processing and various medical and military/aeronautics systems. And were a floating-point processor to ever achieve fixed point-like cost and power consumption metrics, it might also be of interest in consumer electronics' embedded vision and multimedia processing and other mainstream high-volume applications. Adapteva, with the company's Epiphany platform, believes that its floating point DSP architecture is optimized for such tasks, and the recent combination of a cash infusion and a successful 28 nm lithography shrink bolster the company's confidence.

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