DSPs Deliver Up To 10-GHz Throughput With Full Floating-Point Math

Dec. 27, 2010
New TI multi-core DSPs target high performance computing.

C667x series

The TMS320C66x (C667x) series (see the figure) of multicore chips from Texas Instruments targets wireless applications and other apps used in such envelope-pushing, mission-critical areas as medical imaging, high-performance computing, test and automation, broadband, and smart grids.

The series includes the TMS320C6672, the TMS320C6674, and the TMS320C78, which are two-, four-, and eight-core versions, respectively. Offering up to 10-GHz throughput, the chips run at 1.25 or 1 GHz and can deliver up to 320 GMACs or 160 GFLOPS of fixed- and floating-point performance on a single device. (The floating-point mode runs at fixed-point speed).

The series uses TI’s KeyStone multicore architecture, which maximizes the throughput of on-chip data flows to eliminate potential bottlenecks. The architecture features TeraNet, a packet-based fabric of non-blocking channels that helps deliver up to 2 Tbits/s of throughput. The Multicore Navigator enables direct communications between cores and memory access. There are also coprocessor accelerators for packet acceleration and the crypto engine.

The input/output capability of these DSP chips is extensive. There are two lanes of PCI Express Gen II at 2.5 or 5 Gbits/s, four lanes of 5-Gbit/s full duplex serial RapidIO V2.1, two 10/100-Mbit/s Ethernet ports, an Ethernet switch, and four lanes of Hyperlink bus at 12.5 Gbits/s for inter-chip communications or links to FPGAs. There’s also a Telecom Serial Interface Port (TSIP), UART, I2C, SPI, GPIO, a 16-bit External Memory Interface (EMIF-16), and a DDR3-1600 (64b) memory interface.

The C667x chips are pin-compatible and fully backwards compatible with TI’s previous C6000 series of DSPs. Power consumption is less than 10 W at 1 GHz. An extensive line of software and support tools is available. Evaluation modules available for $399 feature TI’s Code Composer Studio software and a suite of application demo codes. Pricing starts at $99 for 1Ku.

A special version of the C667x, the TMS320TC16616 wireless basestation system-on-a-chip (SoC), can tackle 3G or 4G wireless technology including Long-Term Evolution (LTE), WiMAX, and TD-SCDMA. This four-core SoC is a full software-defined radio (SDR) on a chip. It has internal coprocessors for FFT/DFT, turbo encode and decode, Viterbi decode, a rake-search accelerator, WCDMA spreading and dispreading, and IPSec encryption and decryption. These effectively eliminate the need for external FPGAs or ASICs.

Additional features include two 10/100/1000 Ethernet media access controllers (MACs), a management data input/output (MDIO) module, a packet coprocessor that delivers L2 to L4 classification, and a fast Ethernet switch. Other I/O capabilities are similar to those of the C667x versions previously described.

Texas Instruments

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