Chipset speeds DSP system prototyping

The Iris Bridge chipset is a novel low-cost semiconductor product that enables designers to rapidly prototype DSP-based motherboards and platforms using the TMS320 series of digital signal processors.

The Iris Bridge chipset (IRISGBCB11AEE080801) is a novel low-cost semiconductor product that enables designers to rapidly prototype DSP-based motherboards and platforms using the TMS320 series of digital signal processors.

As a new offering in the Texas Instruments (TI) third party programme, the Bridge chipset enables designers to reduce their development time by giving them the ability to quickly and cost-effectively prototype their designs through an easy-to-use front-end graphical user interface (GUI).

Additionally, as part of the TI third party programme, the Bridge chipset provides a complete integrated development environment (IDE), leveraging TI's Code Composer Studio, which features TI's compilers with patented technologies and other third party tools offering designers a powerful board level development environment.

"DSP system developers often spend a significant portion of their development time acquiring knowledge of a variety of special equipment and standalone testing tools to deal with complex testing challenges of their prototype", said Joseph Facca, C6000 Tools Product Marketing Manager.

"The Bridge chipset and IDE solution eliminate these challenges by providing designers an integrated environment in which they can easily program, test and debug software - all in one place, with one familiar easy-to-use tool".

Through the GUI, the Bridge chipset provides flexibility for the developer to run different tests on the target board.

In the past, designers were regulated to using expensive debugging equipment like emulators, logic analysers and other testing tools to run tests.

With the Bridge chipset, they can quickly build and test TI DSP-based motherboards.

Additionally, the Bridge chipset eases the tedious task of debugging testing processor boards by providing snooping ability on peripheral buses and memory and I/Os that are connected to it.

In the snoop mode, designers can view the address and data contents, through the host interface of any selected peripheral, that functions as a storage device or a memory, which eases the debugging process.

The designer also can use the Bridge chipset for logic analysis in the snoop mode more effectively than a simple logic analyser by snooping continuously on the bus while the board is running.

This is accomplished without any special adapter sockets that would be required for latching data from a large number of I/O pins, as in the case of a logic analyser.

All the transactions that take place between the peripherals and other elements on the board and that are connected through the bridge are logged and sent to a PC-based host interface.

The user with a full license to the IP core and the bridge firmware can develop a custom command interpreter for parsing the data that is logged by the host PC.

Designers also can leverage the GUI to configure all peripherals on the board or to program Flash or EEPROM memories using files generated for applications developed using Code Composer Studio.

Another feature afforded to designers of TI DSP-based boards is the ability to extend the peripheral memory map of the DSP in use.

A user-configurable menu is provided that allows the designer, in the prototyping stages, to program the mapping of DSP memory addresses and chip enables to extend the number of chip enables that are available thus extending the number of peripherals connected to the peripheral bus.

"The Bridge chipset is a powerful tool for DSP-based subsystems and systems design, that is a combination of both hardware and software", said KR Guru Prasad, Business Development Manager, Asia Pacific Iris Technologies.

"The bridge allows developers to build a hardware platform and continue developing applications on it using firmware and programmable I/Os without going through a complete design cycle of digital design, system design and architecture and hardware PCB design".

The device is immediately available for the TMS320C6000 platform and can be configured to support all products in the TMS320 family.

Iris Technologies provides reference designs and EVM kits for developers intending to use the Bridge.

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