TI wraps DSP/RISC combo with RTOS support

TI wraps DSP/RISC combo with RTOS support
By Patrick Mannion, EE Times
December 10, 2001 (11:35 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011210S0041

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Texas Instruments Inc. has combined its popular C5000 DSP architecture with an ARM7 Thumb RISC processor and wrapped the result in real-time operating system support, taking dead aim at embedded applications.

The hardware/software solution — which includes Wind River Systems' VxWorks, Accelerated Technologies' Nucleus and RidgeRun's DSPLinux operating systems, as well as TI's own DSP/BIOS — is intended to speed time-to-market of applications such as text-to-speech, wireless data, voice recognition and networked security, while also reducing their cost, size and power consumption, TI said.

The C5470 and C5471 represent "the first off-the-shelf commercially available DSP/RISC combination processors from TI," said product-marketing manager Dennis Barrett. "They're also the first to have RidgeRun's DSPLinux ported to them."

The DSPLinux OS and a board support package — bundled with emulation technology an d hardware-target evaluation modules — is available through Spectrum Digital. RidgeRun supplies the C54x DSP code-generation tools and a DSPLinux Appliance Simulator that performs as an X86 virtual device, allowing development in a PC environment.

The purpose of combining the two disparate processors, said Barrett, is to enable each task in a given application to be targeted at the right device. "High-speed signal and algorithm processing can go to the DSP," he said, "while the man-machine-interface and command-and-control functions can be handled by the ARM."

Rick Seger, vice president of sales at RidgeRun, said the core of the Linux-to-DSP porting project was the development of the DSPLinux TaskBridge. "While implementations to date took anywhere from 50 to 60 kbytes of code, this fourth iteration took only 5 kbytes of code." This was made possible, he said, through a conceptual change that required the code developer to view the devices as processing elements instead of separate devices.

RidgeRun is protecting the code for now, but "we could make it open in the near future," said Seger.

The C5471 differs from the C5470 only by the addition of a 10/100 Ethernet media-access control interface and an Ethernet state machine with a 16-kbit buffer. This is driven by the 47.5-MHz ARM7 RISC core, which is common to both processors.

Both processors also use a C54x DSP running at 100 Mips, supported by 72 kwords of RAM.

The release of the C5470 and C5471 combination DSP/RISC processors comes only a week after TI took its high-end C67x line to even greater heights with the release of the 225-MHz C6713, the first to attain 1,350 million floating-point operations per second. On sheer Mflops numbers alone, the C6713 more than doubles the performance of its nearest competitor, Analog Devices Inc.'s BlackFin (ADSP21535), which comes in at 600 Mflops.

"The C67xx line in general is targeted at wireless infrastructure, multimedia, instrumentation and medical applications," said Martin Burgos, product-marketing manager for TI's floating-point DSPs. "The C6713 specifically targets audio applications." For this, the company has added two multichannel audio serial ports and up to 264 kbytes of on-chip memory.