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APTX Expands Apt-X Audio Codec Lineup, Sells Hardware Division By BDTI, 5/20/2009 At the recent AES convention in Munich, audio technology house APTX (formerly APT, Audio Processing Technology) announced that it is developing a new, scalable variant of its “apt-X” audio compression algorithm. The new codec is called “apt-X Scalable,” and is intended to be used as a single-codec solution in products that process a range of audio inputs, such as mobile devices that include voice, music, ringtones, and other forms of audio. (More)

Xilinx Offers App-Specific Tool Bundles in ISE Design Suite Rev 11.1 By BDTI, 5/20/2009 In February when Xilinx announced its new Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 families, the company also discussed its intention to provide more domain-oriented development tools and development paradigms. In April the company began to make good on its promise by announcing domain-specific tool bundles as part of its new release of the ISE Design Suite, Rev 11.1. (More)

Is Your Development Kit Ready for Customers? By BDTI, 5/20/2009 Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and integrators require more than just hardware from their chip vendors. They demand reliable, easy-to-use software development tools, OS support, middleware and application software components, I/O support, and more—right out of the box. To win design-ins, a chip vendor must deliver much more than just processing performance on a board. Vendors are responding to this demand by packaging development boards, software development tools, and software components in a variety of increasingly sophisticated and diverse development kits. (More)

Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—The Getting-the-Box Experience By Jeff Bier, 5/20/2009 Whenever I talk to chip and tool vendors about the ease-of-use of their products, they invariably brag about how much time they’ve invested in ensuring a good “out-of-the-box experience.”  What they mean is that, when a customer first starts using one of their products (say, a development kit), the customer finds it easy to get the tool up and running.  This is important, and it’s hard to do well.  We here at BDTI often run into glitches in this area: things like missing files, documentation that’s out of sync with the software or hardware, bugs in the install program, etc.  But, worthy topic though it is, the typical out-of-the-box experience is not the subject of today’s rant. (More)