ucent, Moto put heat on TI with
new DSP core
By Darrell Dunn
Electronic Buyers' News
(04/19/99, 04:56:07 PM EDT)
Lucent Technologies Inc. and Motorola Inc. have combined
forces to unleash a new DSP core, the foundation for a
series of devices aimed at unseating market leader Texas
Instruments Inc.
The StarCore alliance, the result of more than a year of
collaboration between Lucent's Microelectronics Group and
Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector, today will
unveil its first effort, a DSP core that boasts 1.2 billion
multiply-accumulate operations per second (MACs)-the
equivalent of 3,000 mips.
"It's a two-horse race," said Thomas Brooks, marketing
director for the alliance at the StarCore Technology Center
in Atlanta. "There is Lucent and Motorola on one side, and
TI on the other. The StarCore alliance brings together two
DSP experts and two communications experts for
best-in-class performance."
The jointly developed core, the SC140, is expected to
begin sampling in the fourth quarter and enter volume
production by the middle of next year. The SC140 core
integrates 16 functional units: four multiply-accumulate
units, four arithmetic-logic units, four bit-field units, two
arithmetic-address units, and one branch-register unit. The
architecture is scalable, and StarCore plans to add
multiply-accumulate and arithmetic-logic units to other
cores.
"It's an awfully sophisticated design and looks very good,"
said analyst Will Strauss of Forward Concepts Co.,
Tempe, Ariz. "You can argue that it's more powerful than
anything TI has offered so far. But powerful only lasts
about 20 minutes in this industry. The question now is, by
the time this is in production, what will TI be announcing?"
The StarCore alliance-as well as a DSP partnership
announced in February between Analog Devices Inc. and
Intel Corp.-has generally been received by analysts as an
attempt to catch up with TI's fifth-generation DSP
architecture, the TMS320C6x, which the company first
introduced two years ago and has now moved into volume
production.
TI's highest-performance DSP in the market is the
TMS320C6202, which offers about 500 million MACs and
2,000 mips. TI has shown roadmaps that would push the
architecture to about 2 billion MACs and 5,000 mips
sometime in the next two years.
The 'C6x and StarCore devices have both required existing
customers to move to non-compatible architectures to
achieve their desired performance increases, and
observers believe the ADI-Intel architecture will follow a
similar path. In fact, a move by all major DSP players to
new architectures and software platforms could even offer
TI a market advantage, claimed Mike Hames, vice
president and worldwide manager for DSPs at TI in
Houston.
"As the market leader, we were able to make the break
two years ago," Hames said. "Now our competitors are
racing against time trying to figure out how to get their
architectures out the door."
Historically, Lucent and Motorola have trailed the DSP
pack in attracting third-party support. The companies
primarily had a market base that was limited to a few large
customers, compared with the mass-market approach of TI
and ADI.
Brooks said one advantage the StarCore alliance will have
over TI is the ability to provide customers with the DSP
industry's first dual-sourced architecture. Although Lucent
and Motorola plan to independently develop standard and
custom chips, they will use compatible software and
compiler tools, which they said should encourage
third-party development and support.
"Having an alternate source is something that has just not
been possible in the DSP world," said Tom Starnes, an
analyst with Dataquest Inc. in Austin, Texas. "It will
provide [customers] with a level of comfort that's been
shown to be important in the microprocessor industry."
Starnes described the StarCore architecture as
impressive, and said it is necessary for Motorola and
Lucent to remain competitive.
"You don't have a choice," he said. "All architectures get
old and find it hard to keep up. You can stay frozen in
history, or at some point you have to go to a completely
new architecture."
Brooks said StarCore is the first "compiler-driven" DSP
architecture, and added that 90% of the software code
required can be written using high-level programming such
as C or C++, instead of native assembly code. However,
citing similar claims made by other DSP suppliers,
Strauss warned that it may take some time for this claim
to be proven in the market.
"There is not a single company that doesn't say their
compiler is the greatest," Strauss said. "It will be at least
another year before we can really tell how good the
compilers are, and how bug-free."
The SC140 uses variable-length execution units that allow
multiple 16-bit instructions and optional prefixes to be
grouped together for single-cycle execution.
Motorola and Lucent both said they will continue to
concentrate their StarCore efforts on the communications
market, boosting performance while reducing power
requirements. At 300-MHz operation, the SC140 core
dissipates 0.1 mA/mips at 1.5 V. The core can also
operate at 0.9 V to reduce power dissipation to 0.066
mA/mips, although the performance yield is reduced to
480 million MACs, or 1,200 mips.
Norden do you think it is likely spectrum would assist lu and mot in development and support of this new architecture? danny |
