Applying technology in the real world
John Scarisbrick, Senior vice president of the Semiconductor Group and manager of worldwide application-specific products
Digital Signal Processing. A decade and a half ago the term was really nothing more than a theory tossed about in university engineering lectures. Today, TI digital signal processing technology is a practical reality all around us. It makes our washers and dryers more reliable, processes our voices in digital cell phones and allows us to inexpensively pack more data on our hard disks. Here are a few places you'll find TI DSP Solutions:
- One out of every two digital cell phones has a TI DSP heart.
- Nine out of 10 hard disk drives are powered by TI DSPs.
- TI DSPs are the brains behind a third of today's high-speed modems.
Just how pervasive is DSP in our lives? It is estimated that we all come into contact with DSP technology at least once every 10 minutes. That's the reason the DSP market hit the billion dollar sales mark in just 12 years, doubled again in two years and added another billion dollars in sales in 1997. The massive microprocessor market didn't make those kinds of strides in the same time period -- partly because it is dependent on how fast the PC market grows.
Electronic brains offer unlimited potential
DSPs, on the other hand, are everywhere. They are the electronic brains that will turn every real-world signal -- light, sounds, temperature and maybe someday even smells -- into ones and zeros that can be recorded, compressed and sent halfway around the world in seconds. Miss mom's home cooking? Dial her up and go for a face-to-face, virtual visit just around dinnertime. Want to get a closer look at the unborn baby? Future sonograms won't be flat and unrealistic. They'll bring back three-dimensional, lifelike images with invaluable information about the baby's health. That's amazing technology. But these are just two examples of the potential DSP Solutions technology holds. In fact, DSPs hold so much promise that their potential is really only limited by our imaginations.
It is this raw potential, this promise of future DSP applications that drives Texas Instruments. As the industry's recognized DSP Solutions leader, TI is committed to educating manufacturers and end consumers of the incredible potential DSP applications hold. A year ago TI was a broad-based, multi-business company with diverse interests. Today, TI is primarily a semiconductor company, with an ardent focus on the proliferation of DSP technology. TI has the broadest and most powerful line of DSPs in the industry, including the new TMS320C6x DSPs. Capable of more than 1600 million instructions per second, 'C6x DSPs are up to 10 times as powerful as any other DSP on the market. This power and performance, combined with TI's 0.18-micron TImeline process technology, will someday enable designers to put the electronics for an entire city's phone system in an area the size of a soup can.
Planning for tomorrow's ideas
Beyond DSPs themselves, TI leads the industry in vital mixed-signal and analog technologies that convert real-world signals into the digital language that DSPs can utilize. TI also delivers world-class hardware and software development tools that are key to shorter design cycles and a manufacturer's competitive edge. Programming in high-level languages makes DSP technology more accessible to a wider range of designers. Finally, TI is putting measures in place to ensure tomorrow's electronic system designers have the education to use this incredible technology. TI is an active sponsor of the more than 900 universities around the world teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level DSP technology. Every other year, TI's University Design contest gives some of the brightest young minds the opportunity to test their innovation and skills in developing new DSP designs. And the company's new $25 million university fund will help ensure this development continues.
Fundamentally, DSP Solutions are about giving people new and innovative ways of experiencing their world. It is about taking technology out of the scientific world and putting it in the real world. As its most fundamental strength, TI is finding new ways -- both in the industry and in the classroom -- of making the promise of DSP applications a reality.
