Development Kit Takes The Bite Out Of Digital Media Application Creation

Oct. 13, 2003

Developing digital media applications can be daunting, which is why Texas Instruments came up with a new digital media development kit. It's equipped with a 600-MHz TMS320DM642 DSP chip on the evaluation board and all the peripheral functions needed to implement a full system solution. The kit also contains a digital media version of the Code Composer Studio integrated development environment and a full suite of application software and utilities

The TMS320DM642, a highly integrated DSP chip, includes three configurable 20-bit video I/O ports, an Ethernet media access controller, and a 32-bit PCI master/slave interface. At 600 MHz, the DM642 can process up to four simultaneous MPEG2 video decodes or a D1 stream with 720- by 480-pixel resolution, either at 30 frames/s. The chip can also perform full main-profile@main-level MPEG2 video encoding in real time.

Besides the evaluation card, other hardware in the kit consists of a digital camera that runs at 30 frames/s and the XDS560 PCI-based emulator, which can bidirectionally stream video data at speeds of up to 2 Mbytes/s. The Code Composer Studio software includes a royalty-free DSP/BIOS real-time kernel and supplies all of the drivers needed for the video interfaces on the evaluation card. Also in the kit are ready-to-use application software modules that developers can just "drop" into their application code.

The digital media development kit lists for $6495 and is available through TI distributors. For users who already own CC Studio, an emulator, and camera, the DM642 evaluation board sells for $1995. To get more information, go to www.ti.com/dmdklaunch.

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About the Author

Dave Bursky | Technologist

Dave Bursky, the founder of New Ideas in Communications, a publication website featuring the blog column Chipnastics – the Art and Science of Chip Design. He is also president of PRN Engineering, a technical writing and market consulting company. Prior to these organizations, he spent about a dozen years as a contributing editor to Chip Design magazine. Concurrent with Chip Design, he was also the technical editorial manager at Maxim Integrated Products, and prior to Maxim, Dave spent over 35 years working as an engineer for the U.S. Army Electronics Command and an editor with Electronic Design Magazine.