Parallel processor for consumer media devices

The first product to reach the market through the new sales agreement between Opal Group and Aspex Technology will be a high-performance, flexible, scalable processor which gives superior performance

The first product to reach the market through the new sales agreement between Opal Group and Aspex Technology will be a high-performance, flexible, scalable processor which gives superior performance for digital media appliances as well as in wired and wireless communications infrastructure.

The VASP 4096 Linedancer, which will tape out later this summer, combines 4096 associative processing elements with functional blocks and glue logic enabling a single chip solution with 1.2 billion MOPS performance.

Media processing applications such as information gateways, speech recognition or image processing systems can thus migrate from an integrated fixed function set of devices into a flexible software implementation.

Aspex Technology specialises in developing advanced processor architectures for next generation consumer electronic products, office automation products, and networking access and communication devices.

Linedancer will be the first off-the-shelf device for sale incorporating Aspex' advanced Associative String Processing Core (ASProCore).

The processor architecture is highly scalable; cascading multiple ASProCores allows application performance to be scaled linearly.

"We are delighted to bring Linedancer to engineers in the UK.

It heralds the new generation of high performance processors for digital media applications", said Graham Wright, Managing Director of Opal Group.

"Traditional solutions that combine DSP and general purpose processors to meet performance requirements suffer from complicated software development and a limited performance roadmap.

The advanced architecture at the heart of Linedancer eliminates these performance, scalability and implementation issues".

The VASP4096 has a 64bit PCI interface for easy integration, and a 266MHz I/O interface for direct high-speed data transfer.

A low level ASP controller, a secondary data movement controller, a 32bit RISC CPU and an integrated primary data store memory module are also integrated.

It is available in a 672-pin STBGA package and peak power consumption is 4W at 266MHz.

Software support includes cross development tools, run-time libraries and a graphical source code debugger for Extended-C code.

Aspex Technology has pioneered the use of associated string processing to manipulate data in ways appropriate to the requirements of consumer digital media devices.

The company's architectural approach combines the implementation simplicity, high performance and immense scalability of the SIMD (single instruction operating on multiple data) computational model, with the natural manner of associative processing to manipulate data in a variety of abstract ways.

This combination of processor technology delivers the performance that developers need to implement the mathematical functions for standards implementation, while retaining the flexibility to customise digital media services.

Each of these qualities is essential to respond quickly to market opportunities created by emerging standards and protocols.

The ASProCore is a programmable, homogeneous and fault-tolerant SIMD parallel processor core incorporating a string of identical processing units, a reconfigurable intercommunication network, and a vector data buffer for fully-overlapped data input-output.

The number of processing units incorporated in a device can be scaled easily to achieve higher processing power.

Linedancer is the first commercially available processor from Aspex, and features a core containing 4096 associative processing elements.

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