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Technology Stocks : Texas Instruments - Good buy now or should we wait? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yousef hashmi who wrote (3863)	6/28/1998 2:10:00 AM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 6180

From the EETimes: <<< Posted: 11:45 p.m., EDT, 6/26/98 TI revs C54X DSP, ADI grabs design wins By Stephan Ohr DALLAS - Asserting its dominance in the market for digital signal processors, Texas Instruments Inc. has announced a new version of its popular C54X series - one with an increased Mips rate, lower power consumption and smaller form factor. Elsewhere, Analog Devices Inc. is announcing user endorsements for its second-generation Sharc processor, which it claims offers the DSP industry's highest floating-point performance. The timing of the otherwise independent announcements may be seen as new volleys in the continuing battle for dominance of the programmable DSP market. Texas Instruments owns more than 45 percent of the $3.22 billion market, according to analyst Will Strauss of Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.), but Analog Devices' DSP business grew almost 50 percent last year to more than $380 million (mostly at the expense of Motorola). Analog Devices is announcing endorsements for its just-announced Sharc-II processor by Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Santa Rosa Systems Division, by Peak Audio (Boulder, Colo.), and by Picker International, a part of General Electric Co. plc of the United Kingdom. HP plans to use ADI's ADSP-21160 in the their own digital receiver products, according to Gerry McGuire, 32-bit DSP product line manager for Analog Devices. Peak Audio is developing professional audio products with the Sharc, and Picker International is using the Sharc in a variety of medical-imaging technologies including computerized tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear medicine and X-ray applications. With a claimed performance rating of 1.2 billion floating-point operations/second, ADI claims its new Sharc is the most powerful 32-bit DSP. A 16-bit device with fixed-point math capability, the C54X device competes more with ADI's 16-bit ADSP218X, and not with the 32-bit Sharc, which is a floating-point device. But the C54X and the Sharc each boast an impressive list of imaginative users. The newest addition to the C5000 architecture - the C5410 - claims the highest Mips rate (100 Mips) and the lowest power consumption (1.13 mW/Mips) for any processor in its class. It runs on 2.8 V (1.8 V in the next iteration), includes 64 kwords (16-bit words) of on-chip SRAM, and comes in a dime-sized "MicroStar" BGA for miniature handheld devices. The design goal of the C5410 was to integrate as much as possible - serial I/O channels and DMA, as well as memory - onto the chip without increasing the battery drain. "Anything that goes off-chip raises the power," said Mark Mattson, TI's C5000 marketing manager. The new device should also reinforce TI's position in certain telecom applications, like T1/E1 framers, where general-purpose DSPs have competed head-to-head with hard-wired FPGAs.>>>>