Until now, Texas Instruments has been noticeably absent from the audio/video-receiver market, seemingly content to concentrate on low-power DSPs and leave home theater to competitors, such as Analog Devices (www.analog.com), Cirrus Logic (www.cirrus.com), Motorola (www.motorola.com), and Yamaha (www.yamaha.com) (see "Processor vendors hope to get an 'arm up' on the competition," EDN, Nov 23, 2000, pg 28). With the explosion in DVD-player sales, however, and the impending ramping up of DTV, TI saw a market opportunity it could no longer ignore, and the result is the company's TMS320DA610. TI claims its new part, built on a C67 DSP foundation and with an audio-optimized peripheral set, delivers three times the performance of its closet competitor (Picture). A bit of marketing hype may have crept into this declaration, but the TMS320DA610's specifications do imply a lot of performance: a 225-MHz clock rate, 32- and 64-bit native data processing, and as much as 1800 MIPS and 1350 MFLOPS.

What will you do with all this speed? TI points to the ever-increasing processing you need to handle 24-bit, 96-kHz, multichannel DTS (www.dtsonline.com), DVD-Audio and SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc), multichannel AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), 10.2-channel configurations and speaker virtualizations, and THX (www.thx.com) and other postprocessing algorithms. Whether the average consumer really cares about high sample rates, large samples, and the perception of 12 speakers is debatable. More compelling are some of TI's other ideas: simultaneous output of multiple digital-audio sources in different rooms of a house and automatic speaker calibration to surmount less-than-ideal room acoustics. Some of these algorithms will reside in the chip's 384 kbytes of ROM, and the remainder, along with coefficient tables, delay line buffers and other scratchpad data, will reside in 256 kbytes of RAM, along with two 4-kbyte, high-speed RAM caches.

TI will make the $16.50 (100,000) TMS320DA610 available for sampling by the end of the first quarter of next year. Until then, you can begin development using another C67 DSP along with an FPGA the company has designed to mimic the TMS320DA610's peripheral set. TI promises that your code migration from this emulator to the final product will be minimal. Watch for EDN's coverage of surround sound for home theater and other listening environments in the upcoming Oct 25 issue.

Texas Instruments, 1-972-995-2011, www.ti.com.