Semi-OT: TI exec heralds DSP era
By Nicolas Mokhoff, EE Times
URL: eetimes.com
SAN JOSE, Calif. ? Proclaiming the arrival of the "era of the DSP," Texas Instruments Inc. vice president John
Scarisbrick told an audience at DSP World on Tuesday (April 11) that the digital signal processor will take over where
the microprocessor left off, serving as the engine of Internet appliances in the next decade just as microprocessors did for the PC in the last. Growing at 30 percent a year, DSPs will be a $13 billion market by 2003, Scarisbrick said. In his keynote address at the conference here, sponsored by CMP Media Inc., publisher of EE Times, Scarisbrick suggested that three principles have enabled TI to drive the digital signal processor chip as a market leader: programmability, silicon technology and, most recently, open-systems development in the form of TI's newest initiative, the Open Multimedia Applications Platform (Omap).
"From the beginning of the monolithic DSP chip in 1978, TI made programmability a DSP mantra," said Scarisbrick. "Our
principle was that, if you can built it in hardware, you can certainly built it in software, given time and enough Mips."
And in software, any bug that is inadvertently added overnight could also be fixed overnight. In hardware, it might take months to get rid of it.
Scarisbrick said that 20 years ago TI targeted four general application areas for the DSP, and that quartet is still being targeted today: speech, modems, signal processing applications and control. "The difference today is that the Internet has broadened the applications areas and is demanding development of next-generation parts at Internet speed," he said.
TI's DSP leadership can be attributed to its practice of never releasing a chip without first providing supporting software development tools, Scarisbrick said. "That was our guiding light 20 years ago and remains so today," he said.
Told you so
Scarisbrick ought to know, having started at TI as a field engineer in the company's U.K. office, moving up to manage
the DSP division from 1984 to 1989, and then becoming the vice president for TI Europe. "At the risk of sounding too
cocky, we can safely say that we told the world 20 years ago that the DSP would become the driving engine for many
applications, and now we are seeing that prediction come true," he said, rattling off such DSP applications as set-top boxes, modems, cell phones, DVD players, image processing gear and all sorts of Internet appliance uses, from downloading music to broadening the communication pipes of the next phase of the Internet itself.
Scarisbrick urged his audience to go out and design for the most interesting applications ? those that are yet
unforeseen. He cited one futuristic possibility taking shape at the University of Illinois, where scientists are attempting to link human nerve endings and stimulate them directly via a DSP. "Many medical applications are being pursued to make the blind see and the hearing-impaired discern sounds again, using DSPs," he said.
Yet the design job is far from easy. "To outsiders DSP design may look deceptively simple ? what's a few thousand lines of code compared to the millions expended to drive the latest microprocessor applications?" said Scarisbrick. "But
bringing the complex mathematical algorithms to bear on the application is no trivial task, and keeps the DSP an
order-of-magnitude difference in performance ahead of the latest X86 architecture."
DSP chips today are fabricated in 0.18-micron linewidths, crunch 2 billion instructions per second, consume less than 0.1 mW and cost in the vicinity of $1.50, on the average. That's why OEMs can afford to place newer and newer DSPs in
cell phones, Scarisbrick said.
"And that's why if you have last year's model you should throw it away ? a newer DSP drives this year's cell phone."
An expected 435 million cell phones will be produced this year, a 60 percent increase over last year's total, which in turn was a 60 percent increase over 1998, said Scarisbrick, quoting estimates from market research house Forward Concepts.
By the end of this decade, Scarisbrick predicted that DSPs will perform calculations at 3 trillion instructions/s and
"probably will be driven by body heat," given that power consumption will keep dropping. That, together with adding
value with the Omap development model, will increase the value proposition of DSPs, according to the keynoter.
Go DSP's!
Jim |
