Silicon Valley, Calif.: The TMS320C6671, the latest digital signal processor (DSP) to join Texas Instruments’ TMS320C66x family, is designed as a stepping stone for developers attempting to ease into the world of multicore. Based on TI’s KeyStone multicore architecture, the C6671 DSP is claimed as the fastest, highest-performance fixed-and floating-point single-core device.
With the C6671, developers can test whether or not multicore devices suit their needs, and explore options for migrating designs to other C66x DSPs if more performance may be required. The device, the first 1.25GHz single-core member of the C66x family, helps familiarise developers with multicore devices.
Features of the C6671 DSP include increased number of peripherals and memory per core, and fixed-and floating-point performance on a single device. By offering pin- and software-compatible platforms across the company’s multicore DSP range, TI says engineers can more easily design integrated, power- and cost-efficient products. Applications include mission-critical, public-safety and defense systems, medical and high-end imaging, test and automation, high-performance computing, and core networking.
TI also enhanced its TMS320C6670 radio system-on-a-chip (SoC). It doubles the power/performance over existing SoC solutions for communications-centric applications.
The 1.2GHz, four-core C6670 SoC incorporates improved accelerators for communications-centric applications such as software-defined radios (SDRs), public safety, and emerging broadband radio systems. New features include a multistandard bit-rate coprocessor (BCP) as well as other coprocessors that accelerate physical-layer processing for LTE, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, and WiMAX. These ultimately increase system capacity and performance with low latency.
In addition, programmable CPU cores and configurable accelerators enable SDRs with a simplified programming model. By adding improved accelerators, developers are able to develop multistandard, communications-centric solutions.