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| PolyCore Tools Designed to Ease Multicore Communications |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
 As computational requirements go up and fab processes increasingly bump up against inconvenient physical limitations, multicore solutions are becoming more attractive. The problem is that no one wants to program them, because there are lots of challenges associated with implementing applications on multiple cores. One challenge lies in handling inter-core communications.
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| Case Study: “Your Mileage May Vary:” Creating Reliable Comparisons of IP Cores |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
An attractive attribute of licensable processor cores is the flexibility chip designers have to adapt these cores to their chosen fabrication process, cell library, tool flow, logic synthesis goals and other conditions. In other words, chip designers can tune the core to the needs of a particular application and to their preferred chip design methodology. An unfortunate side effect of this flexibility is that it can be extremely difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons between licensable cores.
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| Case Study: Making Compilers Smarter |
By BDTI, 5/28/2008
Fifteen years ago DSP engineers expected to write and optimize most of their software in assembly language, and they did it on DSP processors with obscure and highly specialized instruction sets. Back then, compilers for DSP processors were inefficient and couldn’t use many of the processors’ specialized performance-improving features. If you wanted to use bit-reversed addressing or circular buffers or fill delay slots, for example, you’d have to write that code yourself.
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| Catalytic Acquires Celoxica’s C-to-FPGA Tools |
By BDTI, 1/23/2008
 Catalytic recently acquired Celoxica's ESL business. Catalytic already offers a MATLAB-to-C tool, and with the acquisition of Celoxica's C-to-FPGA tool, the company is poised to deliver seamless MATLAB-to-FPGA translation.
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| Case Study: Multi-Tiered Software Optimization |
By BDTI, 1/23/2008
While nearly all signal processing applications require some degree of software optimization, some applications require a sophisticated, multi-tiered optimization approach in order to meet their performance goals.
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| Microchip Switches to MIPS Core for PIC32 |
By BDTI, 12/19/2007
 Last month, Microchip announced a new 32-bit microcontroller chip family, the PIC32. With this family, Microchip—a long-time player in 8-and 16-bit microcontrollers—is going after the 32-bit microcontroller market, and making a big change in architecture. Unlike Microchip’s earlier chips, which were based on the company’s proprietary processor architecture, the new family is based on the MIPS M4K core.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Embedded Processor Wars |
By Jeff Bier, 12/19/2007
For a while there, it seemed as though DSP processors and general-purpose processors (GPPs) were morphing into one another. In an effort to provide better DSP performance, general-purpose processors (GPPs) were incorporating increasingly powerful DSP-oriented features.
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| Evaluating the DSP Capabilities of the Cortex-R4 |
By BDTI, 12/6/2007
In 2004, ARM announced its newest generation of licensable cores, called the “Cortex” family. Cortex cores span a wide range of performance levels, with Cortex M-series cores at the low end, Cortex R-series cores providing mid-range performance, and the Cortex A-series applications processors offering the highest performance. The first Cortex core to be announced was the Cortex-M3, and since then ARM has announced several others, including the Cortex-A8 and A9, the Cortex-M1, and the Cortex-R4.
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| MATLAB-to-C: Are Embedded Programmers Now Obsolete? |
By BDTI, 10/17/2007
Earlier this month The Mathworks announced embedded C code generation capability for its popular MATLAB tool, which is widely used for digital signal processing algorithm design. According to The Mathworks, the new Embedded MATLAB capability is intended to enable MATLAB users to generate efficient C code directly from MATLAB source code files for use in embedded applications.
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| Case Study: How Can You Prove You’ve Got the Best Multimedia Solution? |
By BDTI, 10/17/2007
As multimedia systems grow in complexity, system and SoC developers are increasingly relying on vendors to provide “solutions”—combinations of hardware and software that implement complete multimedia functions such as audio and video compression and decompression. Vendors have responded by offering a growing number of such solutions.
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