Texas Instruments to Introduce
New Digital Signal Processor
By EVAN RAMSTAD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DALLAS -- Texas Instruments Inc. next week will introduce a computer chip that can process 1.6 billion instructions per second, a giant leap in processing power that should make cellular-phone systems and other communications equipment more efficient.
The new digital-signal processor has about 40 times the processing prowess of a comparable chip found in an ordinary computer modem. Though the new chip doesn't move information between two places faster, it allows more information to be exchanged simultaneously, said Gene Frantz, Texas Instruments' business development manager for digital-signal processors.
Used at a phone company switching center or an Internet service company, the new chip can manipulate signals from 24 calls at once, an operation that previously required 24 chips.
Future digital-signal processors in the new product family will be designed for other uses, such as controlling graphics in computers. Texas Instruments is the leading maker of DSPs with about 45% share of the $2.28 billion market, according to Forward Concepts Inc. of Tempe, Ariz.
The company is also one of the top U.S. makers of memory chips. Its stock rose 7%, or $4.75, to $74.50 in composite New York Stock Exchange trading Thursday on news that Samsung Electronics Co.'s U.S. unit would reduce memory-chip production to halt steep price drops.
Texas Instruments' last major DSP product family, introduced in 1994, included the first DSP chips with two parallel processing units. In building the new product, the company placed eight processing units on a chip and made them easier to program, a change that makes the chips more versatile.
DSPs are designed to perform a small number of functions effectively and are found in compact-disk players, wireless phones, digital cameras and other audiovisual devices. By contrast, general purpose processors, including the microprocessor in a personal computer, execute instructions less quickly but are more versatile. The best microprocessors now handle about 600 million instructions a second. |
