TXN vs. ADI Part II:TI and ADI processors go toe to toe in 3G wireless
By Patrick Mannion, EE Times
Feb 20, 2001 (8:04 AM)
URL: eetimes.com
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Texas Instruments Inc. and Analog Devices Inc. have fired the latest salvos in the intensifying battle to win over 3G wireless developers. TI has announced the first in a series of applications processors based on its much-publicized dual-processor Open Multimedia Applications Platform (OMAP), while ADI said it will incorporate the new Frio DSP into its SoftFone family of baseband processors. TI's new processor places the OMAP architecture at the core of a suite of peripheral support chips and interfaces, all geared toward taking advantage of what TI touts as the lowest-power, highest-performance wireless platform for 3G applications. The TI announcement follows demonstrations of a number of OMAP-based applications at the Wireless Symposium/Portable by Design conference here last week.
On the applications-processor front, Analog Devices (Norwood, Mass.) announced Frio, the code name for a 300-MHz, 600 million multiply-accumulate (MAC) DSP core co-developed with Intel Corp. The processor design is an effort by both companies to bolster their DSP arsenals as they battle TI for a share of the 3G market.
Jointly announced in late December as the Micro Signal Architecture (MSA), the DSP core came with limited performance details, though dynamic voltage and clock-rate scaling are key features that will allow Frio to compete in the power-strapped handheld market.
Intel has outlined plans to incorporate the MSA into its Personal Client Architecture (PCA), a dual-processor wireless platform with its XScale processor as the RISC component. The combination will compete directly with TI's OMAP. The company expects to roll out products based on the PCA later this year.
Moderating a panel on advanced semiconductor architectures for 3G applications at the Wireless Symposium last week, Will Strauss, president of research firm Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.), validated the TI and Intel approaches. "This division of labor between a DSP and a RISC processor is the right way to go to higher performance for handheld devices," he said. "Applications are demanding more processing power for Level 2 and 3 protocols, resource management, the user interface and overall operating-system functions. At the same time, the high date rates of 3G networks mean that real-time functions such as echo cancellation, voice encoding/decoding, parsing, encryption and 'chip-rate processing' demand the performance and low power consumption of the DSP."
Discussing the ability of Intel and ADI to loosen TI's grip on the wireless market, Strauss refers to a soon-to-be-released report from Forward Concepts that will show a 4 percent drop in market share for TI's DSPs, from 48 percent to 44 percent. The figures also show ADI inching up with a 2 percent gain, after record growth in market share the year before. For its part, Motorola looks to be showing a 60 percent growth in overall DSP revenue, "though those figures have to be confirmed," said Strauss.
Unimpressed, TI's worldwide OMAP marketing manager, Paul Werp, said, "There's just no way either Intel or ADI can compete with our installed base of developers and available code."
No locks
ADI's Doug Grant, RF business director, disagreed, saying, "3G wireless will be a very large market, with lots of room for new and innovative architectures and applications. No one company will have a lock on it."
While Intel's PCA might have the upper hand in flash capabilities, Werp pointed to ongoing work with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to incorporate a stacked-flash approach that he expects will give OMAP equal footing.
A key component of TI's new applications processor is the DSP/BIOS Bridge, which the company developed to reconcile the seemingly schizophrenic nature of the dual-processor approach. The bridge routes the real-time and non-real-time code streams to the on-board 'C55X DSP running at 200 MHz, or the TI-enhanced ARM925 RISC running at 175 MHz.
Werp said the bridge "not only enhances performance, but also allows programmers who don't have DSP experience to take advantage of the full capabilities of the 'C55X processor through a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and function calls. The goal is to make programming on OMAP as simple and as transparent as possible."
To facilitate this, OMAP uses standard APIs to interface between the designer and multimedia engines (video/Web/audio) that make use of proxies for related DSP tasks. The bridge coordinates data, I/O streams and DSP task control between the proxies and the DSP software.
Peripheral and interface support on the chip — around the OMAP core — include a 16-bit LCD control/frame buffer for a 1/4-inch VGA display, a shared-memory interface, USB client and host control, a Bluetooth interface, a digital camera interface and Sony memory stick support. A tri-bus memory architecture supports SDRAM, flash/ROM, and a frame buffer (internal SRAM).
The processor is sampling today, with production expected by the third quarter. OMAP evaluation modules are available now.
Companies already up and running with OMAP-enabled applications demonstrated them at the Wireless Symposium last week. Among those showing product was Snapshield (Tel Aviv, Israel), which demonstrated how the processing capabilities of the OMAP architecture allowed it to securely deliver faxes, voice communications data and streaming multimedia across and between 2.5, 3G, the public-switched telephone network and Internet Protocol networks.
Other OMAP customers and developers include Ericsson, Nokia, Sony, Handspring, Real Networks, Packetvideo, Microsoft, Symbian and Sun Microsystems. |
