HOUSTON (Jan. 30, 1995) -- A new digital signal processor (DSP) designed to bring the benefits of floating-point processing to high-volume DSP application markets, was announced today by Texas Instruments. At a suggested resale price of $9.95 each in high volume, the announcement marks the first time DSP system developers can gain the cost, time-to-market, and performance advantages of designing with a floating-point processor at the cost of a comparable fixed-point design.
This price breakthrough from TI's newest DSP solution, the TMS320C32, allows product engineers to employ the same floating-point DSP technology used for easy research and development (R&D) prototyping, eliminating the customary, time-consuming switch to fixed point for commercial deployment.
"With the 'C32, we can now design higher performance hand-held 2-D bar code scanners and reduce our system cost at the same time," says Hal Charych, engineering director at Symbol Technologies (Bohemia, NY). "The enhanced memory interface allows us to reduce our system cost, and the lower power dissipation gives us a product that is light-weight, more portable, and has a longer battery life." Other 'C32 applications include professional and consumer audio, video games, telecommunication equipment, digital printers and copiers, industrial, motor control and automotive applications.
To lower system costs, the 32-bit TMS320C32 architecture uses unique memory management and data-packing features to enable the flexible use of 8-, 16-, or 32-bit wide memory architectures, maximizing memory-system efficiency. In addition, the 'C32 architecture features two new low-power modes, plus an on-chip, two-channel DMA coprocessor for data movement to maximize the CPU performance.
"The 'C32 brings a particularly attractive set of performance capabilities, architectural features, and design tools to a class of applications and products that previously could only be cost-effectively implemented with fixed-point DSPs," said John Cooper, TI's DSP marketing manager. "By using the same device for R&D and production, you remove a major time-to-market inefficiency."
Product designers can take full advantage of the widespread development support available for the TMS320C3x family, including high-level language compilers, and third-party boards and software. New third-party products supporting the 'C32 include evaluation/target boards from DSP Research (Sunnyvale, CA), and Loughborough Sound Images Limited (Loughborough, U.K.), and vocoder, modem, and telephony software from DSP Software Engineering (Bedford, MA).
Third-party products are critical in helping designers speed up the development process. The register-based 'C32 architecture also provides advantages in ease-of-development and performance over fixed-point processors. With features such as a Von Neumann architecture, an extended precision register set, and multiple-bus structure, designers can choose to develop in C or assembly code speeding time-to-market.
The TMS320C32 device will be available in 40-MHz, 50-MHz, and 60-MHz versions. Suggested resale pricing for the 40-MHz (40 MFLOPS) TMS320C32PQFP will be $9.95 for volumes greater than 250K units per year, $15 each for 100K to 250K units per year, and $25 each for 5K units per year. The 40-MHz and 50-MHz 'C32 are scheduled to begin sampling first quarter 1995. The 60-MHz 'C32 is scheduled to sample in second quarter 1995. Volume production is scheduled for third quarter 1995.
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