Floating Point DSP/ARM Combo Targets Consumer Applications

Professional quality home-audio sound and acoustic diagnosis systems are possible with the AT572D740 Diopsis dual processor system-on-a-chip (SOC). The chip contains the following: an ARM7; peripherals; and a complex domain, 40-bit precision, VLIW, floating-point DSP. The DSP has 16K by 40-bit dual-port data memories and 256 pairs of 40-bit registers. At 100 MHz, DSP throughput is 1.5 billion operations/s, one billion of which are floating point. The ARM7 executes at a frequency of 50 MHz. Either processor can act as master or slave, or both can operate simultaneously and independently. A 128 KB program memory holds 24,000 cycles of compressed program information. Peripherals include two SPI serial ports, two USARTs, a timer/counter, watchdog, parallel I/O port, peripheral data controller, eight ADC and eight DAC interfaces, clock generator and interrupt controller. Power dissipation is 750 mW per GFLOP. The SOC is packaged in a 352-ball PBGA and is priced at $30 each/1,000 for an industrial temperature range device. ATMEL CORP., San Jose, CA. (408) 441-0311.