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DSP Directory 2001
DSPs are hot. According to market analysis from Forward Concepts ( http://www.fwdconcepts.com ), DSPs in 2000 became the largest processor-market segment, passing the traditionally strong 8-bit-microcontroller market. Compared with 1999 statistics, DSP worldwide shipments in dollars were up 40%, outpacing the overall processor market, which was up a healthy 31%.
Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor, and Maura Hadro Butler, Associate Editor -- EDN, 3/29/2001
DSPs are hot. According to market analysis from Forward Concepts (http://www.fwdconcepts.com), DSPs in 2000 became the largest processor-market segment, passing the traditionally strong 8-bit-microcontroller market. Compared with 1999 statistics, DSP worldwide shipments in dollars were up 40%, outpacing the overall processor market, which was up a healthy 31%. Reflecting the growth in DSP shipments, this year's DSP directory includes more devices than ever before.
In addition to the traditional general-purpose and reconfigurable DSPs, our directory identifies application-specific devices. This category is duly warranted: More than half of the devices fall into it. The directory lists only programmable devices, so it does not include devices with integrated DSP cores that restrict users to just setting some operating parameters.
You can sum up the overwhelming trend for this year's devices in two words: "networks" and "communications." Networks have become the enabling vehicles by which vendors are developing and delivering so many new (or repackaged) applications, most notably wired and wireless infrastructure devices, as well as video-over-network and voice-over-network devices, such as voice over IP, voice over DSL, and voice over ATM. Without DSP devices, streaming multimedia over the Internet would be severely limited.
Over the years, multiple MAC (multiply-accumulate) units have become more common. Further upping the performance ante, vendors have designed a number of devices to support multiple parallel DSP cores and computational units. These devices especially suit the inherent parallelism in the high volume of data that central-office voice- and data-processing as well as image-processing applications manage. These types of applications may provide the parallel- data width necessary to take advantage of the nearly 1 billion-MAC/sec usable performance on some of these devices.
As Moore's law continues to march forward, it has become practical to include on-chip accelerators, such as Viterbi decoders for forward error correction, not just on application-specific devices, but also on some general-purpose devices. In spite of the increase in processing performance, low power consumption remains a significant concern, especially for those devices serving the wireless- and portable-application market.
DSPs have become integral to many high-volume designs in which time to market is critical. As a result, DSP vendors are partnering with third-party vendors; investing in development suites that include not only a full tool chain of assemblers, compilers, debuggers, emulators, and profilers, but also libraries of application-software modules. These partnerships are crucial to the DSP market, because they provide software that's difficult to write and make these chips feasible to use. All of the performance and functions on these devices means little if you can't complete the coding for them in less than a year.
EEMBC, the EDN Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, has a variety of benchmarks that target the applications that the DSPs described in this directory perform. Benchmark scores are available at http://www.eembc.org.
