Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: Texas Instruments (April 2001-March 2006) | Subject: TMS320C6412
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 21 November 2003
DSP squeezes in more peripherals
A new highly integrated DSP chip aims to reduce overall system costs and open the door to designers in need of affordable DSPs to handle high-performance capabilities.
A new highly integrated DSP chip aims to reduce overall system costs and open the door to designers in need of affordable DSPs to handle high-performance capabilities The C6412 is suited for a wide variety of high-performance applications and is particularly ideal in signal processing areas such as telecom infrastructure, networking and high-end imaging
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 17 Feb 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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"With the TMS320C6412, TI is addressing the market need, offering developers a compelling combination of high performance, rich peripherals and on-chip memory at a reasonable price".
For networking, telecomms infrastructure and high-end imaging applications such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), visual inspection, high-end professional still cameras and video infrastructure, the new C6412 DSP offers three aspects that make it exceptionally attractive.
The C6412 DSP, an addition to the high-performance TMS320C6000 roadmap, delivers 64 general-purpose 32bit registers and its eight parallel functional units can compute four 16bit multiply-accumulates (MACs) per clock cycle.
TI is offering both a 500 and 600MHz C6412 device at affordable price points.
The 500MHz device, priced at only $39.95, achieves 2000 million MACs (MMACs) per second, a substantial price/performance ratio of less than 2 cents per MMAC.
This horsepower is sufficient, for instance, to process up to 8x more simultaneous telecomms channels than competitive solutions.
In addition to input/output support such as the 64bit external memory interface, the 64-channel enhanced direct memory access controller and 16 general-purpose I/O lines, the C6412 also integrates a 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet MAC (EMAC).
Typically in the $5-7 range as a separate chip, the integrated EMAC on the C6412 saves board space, system cost and time to market.
Ethernet-based communications is mandatory in applications such as VoIP and video infrastructure networks.
The C6412 also features an I2C module which may be used by the DSP to control local peripherals or to communicate with any I2C-bus-compatible device.
Designers can also choose to work with an internal 66MHz PCIbus interface, or a 16/32bit host port interface to simplify host processor connectivity.
The device features 288Kbyte of SRAM, which helps handle the application requirements of sophisticated systems without presenting an input/output bottleneck.
The right mix of peripherals, performance, on-chip memory and price allows for system simplification and reduced requirements for external memory, which translates into fewer components, a smaller, less expensive PC board and, ultimately, a lower cost end-user product.
Also, code compatibility with the C6412 and other C6000 devices allows customers to not only port existing code to this new device, but also ensure they will be able to take advantage of future devices in the C6000 platform as they become available.
"Working with samples while under evaluation agreements, customers have already found the combination of features extremely attractive", said Thomas Brooks, TMS320C6000 Marketing Manager, TI.
"One early adopter designing a telecomms infrastructure card using eight DSPs from a chip competitor.
The customer soon discovered that as few as two C6412 DSPs could handle twice the number of channels, and by eliminating extra devices the company was able to significantly decrease the end users' cost per channel".
Engineers can immediately evaluate their design with this new DSP thanks to the TMS320C6416 DSP starter kit (DSK).
It contains a development board with 512Kbyte of Flash, 16Mbyte of SDRAM, the Code Composer Studio (CCStudio) integrated development environment (IDE) and a USB cable for attaching to a host PC.
The C6412 DSP is supported by TI's eXpressDSP software and development tools, including CCStudio IDE, the industry's most easy-to-use DSP IDE, and the DSP/BIOS real-time kernel.
TI's library of DSP and imaging software modules, best-in-class software development tools and eXpressDSP-compliant application-specific software from the DSP industry's largest third party network all add up to faster time to market for the designers of affordable high-performance applications.
TI is currently sampling the TMS320C6412, available in both 500 and 600MHz clock speeds, with production scheduled for 2Q04.
Pricing starts at $39.95 for 10,000-off quantities at 500MHz.
The C6416 DSK is also available today for $395.
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