 | March 1, 2000 |
Appliance engines
SILICON: Power-miser processors
Many appliances of the convergence era will offer wireless connectivity—some forecasts predict as many as 1 billion worldwide users of wireless data services by 2002. To power both the end nodes, such as 3G cell phones, and the infrastructure equipment,
the vendors of that equipment will need new generations of DSP technology. At the recent Wireless Symposium (San Jose, Feb 22-25), Texas Instruments announced two new DSP cores targeting just such applications.
The TMS320C55x operates at speeds to 400 MHz and offers the processing power necessary for portable devices to handle applications such as digital imaging and digital audio. Moreover, the chip helps extend battery life in portable appliances by enabling a six-fold reduction in power, relative to its predecessors.
For infrastructure applications such as wireless base stations, meanwhile, the TMS320C64x will operate at speeds to 1.1 GHz and perform 9000 MIPS (million instructions per second).
The processors will find use in DSL and voice-over-data applications. According to Roland Acra, vice president and general manager of Cisco's remote-access business unit, "The C5x and C6x programmable DSPs from TI are key engines for the new Internet Ecosystem that converges data, voice, and video into packetized, standards-based, interoperable applications."
—by Maury Wright
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