Analog Devices core aimed at multichannel comms applications

Analog Devices core aimed at multichannel comms applications
By Patrick Mannion, EE Times
October 18, 2000 (2:42 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001018S0026

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Analog Devices has weighed in with its first implementation of its 16-bit ADSP219x core announced last year. Dubbed the '2192, the device is a dual-core monolithic digital signal processor (DSP) aimed squarely at high-density, multichannel applications such as voice, fax and data over the Internet, as well as PBX extenders and telephony.

With a total processing power of 320 Mips, the device comes with glueless PCI, USB and AC '97 system interfaces that the company expects will make it an ideal candidate for Internet access devices (IAD). Other applications include small and home offices, data acquisition (a market that has been waiting for a DSP with an integrated PCI bus controller) as well as multimode modems (V.90/DSL). The device can support up to 12 VoIP channels and up to six V.90 modems.

The ADSP2192 is supported by VisualDSP V7.0, an integrated development environment that includes a complete suite of multiprocesso r development tools that are designed to ease the complexities of designing with multiple channels.

The Norwood, Mass., company also took advantage of the announcement opportunity to outline its roadmap, which calls for three major paths of development. Along with the dual-core approach, which the company expects to take to 1200 Mips, the roadmap describes two single-core paths: one for midrange applications, the other for low-power designs, all the way down to 0.05 mW/Mips at 1.0 V.

The 219x core itself offers a 4X performance improvement over the previous 218x core design yet is fully assembly-code compatible. According to Joe Salamone, product marketing manager for general-purpose DSPs at Analog Devices, "This ensures that our customers have a solid development path while keeping costs down and speeding time to market. With the '2192's dual-core implementation we take it a step further by focusing on multichannel applications, whereas the 218x has to date been very popular in single-channel design s, though it also supports a substantial RAS modem multichannel business."

The '2192 integrates 140 Kwords of RAM, including 4 Kwords of shared RAM, to simplify programming and eliminate potential bottlenecks that might prevent the cores from operating at full throttle. "Unlike competitive products," said Salamone, "each core has access to the full data and program bus bandwidth, as well as dedicated program and data memory. This allows each DSP to run at full speed and operate at close to peak performance." Salamone estimates that the design gives the device a 30 percent improvement in channel density over the competition.

Each core is independent, with a program sequencer controlling the flow of instruction execution to allow two instructions to be executed every clock cycle. A fully transparent instruction cache allows simultaneous mathematical operations to be performed in every instruction cycle.

The shared data memory has the advantage of facilitating inter-processor communication for effic ient execution of signal-processing algorithms, while a shared peripheral bus allows each DSP equal access to data I/O. "The glueless PCI, USB and AC '97 interfaces that are included on the '2192 also help keep overall system costs down and get our customers up and running quickly," said Salamone. The company is the first to include both a PCI and a USB interface.

Emphasizing the point, Gerald McGuire, product line director for general-purpose DSPs, said, "The system interfaces are one of the really exciting aspects, as the approach goes along with our design philosophy which is to choose the system interfaces carefully to balance the DSP horsepower. This helps to optimize overall system performance."

The '2192 is priced at $35 each per 25,000 and is sampling now, with full production by April 2001. Packaging is as a 144-pin LQFP.

The VisualDSP development tool is also available now. The tool allows simultaneous viewing of assembly source code running on each core, with full access to each core's resources. The designer can stop and restart each core independently, and look at each core's registers. According to McGuire, "We really tried to make life easy for developers trying to get off the ground with multiple-core designs."

EZ-KIT lite, a PCI-based development kit, will be available in November, as will an emulator. Pricing for the kit will be $295.