Texas Instruments' TMS320C6713 DSP doubles the available processing power over the company's earlier floating-point devices. TI rates the product, targeting high-precision audio and imaging applications, at 1350 MFLOPS with a clock rate of 225 MHz. Peripherals include two multichannel audio-serial ports; two I²C-control ports; two multichannel, buffered serial ports; a 16-channel enhanced-DMA controller; and L1 and L2 caches. The Level 1 and Level 2 caches comprise 4 and 256 kbytes, respectively, of program and data memory. The device handles as many as 16 stereo channels of I²C sound at four clock rates. The ability to execute eight 32-bit instructions per cycle supports fine resolution and control of mechanical and robotics applications. Process improvements have also increased the performance of the 900-MFLOPS C6712 and 1200-MFLOPS C6711 parts. The product range maintains code compatibility, and the C6711 design-starter kit exploits this compatibility. The $295 kit includes a board with a 150-MHz DSP plus the Code Composer Studio design environment for connection to your PC. The C6713 costs $26.85 (10,000), and samples will become available in the second quarter of this year.

TI has also introduced two devices that use the C5400 core with an ARM RISC core for highly integrated applications. The C5470 and 5471 operate at 100 MHz for the DSP core and 47.5 MHz for the RISC core, and you can use them to yield significant savings in board area and power consumption over an approach using separate devices. The two differ in that the C5471 carries a 10/100 Ethernet port, whereas the C5470 does not. You can also run embedded Linux on these chips using RidgeRun's (www.ridgerun.com) DSPLinux, which centres on an open-source Linux microkernel with a full set of drivers and utilities and a full development-tool chain. A C547x development board with DSP Linux is available from Spectrum Digital (www.spectrumdigital.com).

Texas Instruments, www.dspvillage.ti.com.