FROM EDN EUROPE: TI's first DaVinci products offer "easy video"
by Graham Prophet -- EDN, January 5, 2006
Texas Instruments has fleshed out the first details of the first deliverables under the DaVinci brand, highly integrated product offerings for digital video designs. DaVinci bundles silicon and software with development support that will allow you to build video products without expertise in codecs or DSP—it will allow you to design with video building blocks at a higher level of abstraction than writing and assembling all of the code. In this release, there are two chips, plus multimedia (software) codecs, APIs, frameworks and development tools. You can, says TI, add digital video to an application with no more involvement than writing to an API, although you can use the offering as a gateway to the more detailed capabilities of Code Composer Studio if you so wish.
The silicon is coded TMS320DM6443 and 6446. The former handles video decode, the latter decode and encode. They integrate a C64 DSP core with an ARM 926 core, plus video accelerators, networking peripherals and memory interfaces. Capabilities include analogue and digital video output with resizing and on-screen display engine. The 6446 has a front-end capture unit that handles multiple video formats.
In its first release, TI bases the software platform on Linux, with MontaVista as development tool provider. To this, the software part of the offering adds open APIs, and device drivers and multimedia codecs. Other operating systems are hinted at, for future release. TI emphasises that the silicon in this announcement is an enabling component and presents the overall release as a digital video system offering; in hardware terms, however, it's also worth noting that TI equipped the chips to directly connect to a wide range of analogue peripherals that it has chosen not to integrate. At the development level, you'll work entirely in the Linux environment, with "middleware" hiding the details of the codecs. Similarly, interprocessor communications between DSP and RISC engines are also part of the package. However, programmers who wish to work in Code Composer Studio will be able to exercise control over the ARM core from that package—in operation, you'll call DSP functions through the ARM. This approach, TI says, allows a modular, building-block approach to applications design—you'll be able to exchange a software codec for an upgrade or alternative, or scale an application up or down. A fully-equipped (including camera) evaluation board, the Digital Video Evaluation Module, supports the introduction.
Texas Instruments, www.ti.com.
