Licensable IP houses leapfrogging DSP incumbents

By Will Strauss
dspdesignline.com (June 25, 2009)

Noting that CEVA, Tensilica and ARC have recently launched radically new DSP-specific architectures, I began to wonder if the traditional DSP chip suppliers, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Freescale, LSI and NEC have been as aggressive in their recent offerings. I don't mean to infer that the licensable IP cores are better than those of the DSP silicon vendors, but there is the perception is that the licensing folks are more aggressive in introducing new and novel architectures.

TI continues to rollout new DSP chips, but they are based substantially on shrinking geometries, adding more features, accelerators or more memory and I/O to legacy architectures. Of course, TI's mantra has always been "code compatibility," so maybe that's not a bad approach. Freescale seems to be frozen in time on its base 16-bit DSP architecture, although the company has provided some remarkable additions for its heavy-duty, StarCore quad-core infrastructure chips. For basic DSP needs, the company seems to have made more progress in beefing up its legacy 32-bit Coldfire RISC product line with DSP capability. But that's bolting on features to an architecture that harkens back to the Motorola 68000 (c.1979).

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