Out in Front: November 23, 1995

Targeting audio signal-processing applications, the BULLETdsp Type-III PCMCIA card from Communication Automation & Control relies on a Texas Instruments TMS320C32 floating-point DSP to deliver 50 Mflops of processing power. The card integrates two stereo-CD-quality I/O channels based on Crystal Semiconductor's CS-4231 multimedia codec. The card also in-cludes as much as 1 Mbyte of SRAM, 4 Mbytes of DRAM, and 512 kbytes of flash memory.

To ensure that audio-processing tasks can run in real time, the BULLETdsp design dedicates a dual-port 256332-bit RAM block, a memory-mapped 32-bit timer, a code cache, and a DMA channel to each audio channel. The codec provides line-in, line-out, and phantom-powered microphone-in channels. Moreover, the integrated sigma-delta A/D input features 64-times oversampling and linear phase, digital antialiasing filters. Both the host processor and the onboard DSP can control the codec's programmable sample rate, input gain, output attenuation, and data-conversion modes.

The BULLETdsp costs $895 with 256 kbytes of SRAM. Software support includes TI's C compiler and assembler development platforms. The company also expects to offer the card in a Type II PCMCIA package in the first quarter of '96.
-- by Maury Wright

Communication Automation & Control Inc, Allentown, PA. (610) 776-6669.