Aiming to raise the bar in channel density and processing power for upcoming wireless and Internet networks, Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics Group has unwrapped a new product family. This line combines the processing horsepower of Atlanta-based StarCore's SC140 DSP core with the modularity of the Daytona high-speed local interconnect bus architecture. Known as the StarPro series, this family promises to quadruple the channel density per DSP chip for wireless switches, voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateways, and remote-access servers.
The line's initial release, the 16-bit StarPro 2000, is the first Lucent derivative of the SC140 core. It's also the first device to exploit the Daytona bus architecture. The StarPro 2000 uses three SC140 DSP cores on-chip to deliver a processing power of 3.6 billion MACs/s at 300 MHz. At the same time, it only consumes 1.5 W at full speed, using a 1.5-V core voltage. This power dissipation doesn't include any I/O activity, either. The I/O operating voltage is 3.3 V, or 2.5 V nominal.
Designed for multichannel infrastructure applications, the StarPro 2000 can process up to 64 wideband CDMA basestation voice/data channels. It also can process the speech coding and echo cancellation of 64 wireless voice channels and V.90 data channels.
Other salient features on-chip include 768 kbytes of shared SRAM, three serial I/O units, one parallel interface unit, two 32-bit external memory interface units, and eight memory-to-memory DMA channels. Because the SC140 has demonstrated excellent control-code efficiency, the StarPro 2000 can execute a mix of control and DSP functions on the same chip.
The initial StarPro 2000 is based on a 0.16-µm CMOS with six metal layers. It comes housed in a 516-ball-pad plastic BGA. Sampling to key customers in December, it's slated for production by early 2001. In 100,000-unit quantities, the StarPro 2000 costs $100 each.
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