Octasic Announces High Performance Asynchronous DSP Core

-- Octasic, a leading innovator of media processing solutions, today announced its Opus DSP architecture that changes the fundamental design of DSPs, which are the building blocks of communications equipment.

The Opus architecture solves the most pressing issue of the DSP industry, power consumption. Building a network that can deliver on the full promise of broadband communication will require more processing capacity in every piece of equipment. DSP manufacturers continue to pack more and more processing capacity into DSPs to meet this challenge but the power consumed by traditional designs is rising faster than the gains in capacity. With Opus, Octasic breaks this barrier by delivering unprecedented power to performance ratios.

“Through its asynchronous design, Opus provides 3 times more performance per watt than current DSP architectures on the market today,” said Doug Morrissey, Octasic CTO. “While the DSP core construction is clock-less, to the programmer it presents a traditional processing model. This is important to allow today’s DSP programmers to take full advantage of its capabilities without having to be retrained to re-write and re-partition existing applications.”

Other architectures that deliver on lower power break the traditional programming model and require a new approach to developing and coding algorithms in order to achieve the low power benefit. Once this large investment is made in re-training programmers and re-writing code, the customer is locked in as all these approaches are proprietary.

One of the strengths of the Opus architecture is that it maintains a traditional programming model preserving customers’ investment in applications and skill set. The ability to achieve such low power enables developers to leverage a multi-core DSP architecture without re-writing code. The Opus kernel and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provide the tools necessary to quickly develop, test, and debug software for this high-performance DSP platform in a predictable fashion.

Octasic’s Vocallo multi-core media gateway DSP product, also announced today (see related release on Vocallo), is the first Octasic product based on the Opus core. Vocallo represents a new generation of multi-core DSPs for media gateways, and is designed to allow OEMs to develop the products they require today, with the flexibility and expandability to evolve to future product generations.

“Opus is the key to the future of Octasic,” said Michel Laurence, Octasic CEO & Chairman of the Board. “The Opus platform will allow us to expand into new DSP communication markets. It combines the best power performance without compromising usability and is well suited to leverage the full value of deep sub-micron foundry processes.”

About Octasic

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Octasic, Inc. is a global provider of complete silicon and software solutions for the converged carrier, enterprise and end-point communication equipment markets. Octasic’s scalable leading-quality voice, video and data solutions offer next-generation manufacturers optimal flexibility and unmatched performance in terms of features, density, cost and power consumption. For more information, please visit www.octasic.com.