Digital ICs/DSP: Budget-Priced High-Speed DSP Delivers 2000 MMACs At 500 MHz

Nov. 10, 2003

The TMS320C6412 DSP, available in 500- and 600-MHz speed grades, promises to reduce overall system costs and provide an affordable high-performance solution. The processor packs a rich set of peripherals: an Ethernet media access controller, a PCI port, a host port interface, and up to 288 kbytes of on-chip RAM. Also on-chip are 64 general-purpose 32-bit registers and eight functional units that can compute four 16-bit multiply-accumulates (MACs) per clock cycle. Engineers can start development using the TMS320C6416 DSP starter kit, which contains a development board with 512 kbytes of flash, 16 Mbytes of SDRAM, software tools, and a USB cable to connect to a host PC. The 500-MHz chip costs $32.95 and achieves 2000 million MACs. Samples of the C6412 are available in both 500- and 600-MHz speed grades.

Texas Instruments Inc.www.ti.com

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.