I received my ADI 1998 annual report. Here are a few quotes
As I don't have a scanner I will highlight a couple of points.
"Wireless communication is an important growth engine for our analog IC busines, and we are well positioned with outstanding design talent, proprietary process technologies and a premier customer list. We are focused on winning designs at top suppliers of wireless basestation equipment, including Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel, Motorola and many other major telcom accounts with established channelsto the marketplace. Base station customers need analog and DSP expertise simultaneously applied to meet their toughest signal-processing challenges. Our new AD6600 chipset is a good example of what can happen when our signal processing skills are tapped by key accounts: today this important chipset is being designed is being designed into most major base stations around the world."
"Innovations in DSP architecture are only half the story. By offering an intuitiveprogramming language and providing a roadmap of code-compatible products, we are helping to preserve our customers' investments and shorten their development cycles. To further simplify the most complex design challenges, our visualDSP software development environment offers designers a consistent, convient graphical framework to easily develop, debug and deploy their DSP based systems, and get them to market sooner. While ADI continues to chart the course
for the next DSP breakthroughs in cost, performance, and ease of use, we are proud to be supported by many of the industry's leading development partners. Together, we are committed to providing all the application support and documentation engineers require as they develop new products for the next millennium."
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From Spectrum: Ready for Sharcs
spectrumsignal.com
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The SHARC product range from Spectrum Signal Processing offers a wide
range of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products to cover nearly any
parallel SHARC application requirement. Boards are available for all of the standard host environments including PCI, ISA, and ruggedized 6U VME. Through the use of a truly scaleable hardware architecture and
advanced software technology, Spectrum SHARCPAC systems can address a
number of high-end embedded applications including RADAR, SONAR, image
processing and more.
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Today's floating-point DSP applications are more demanding than ever,
with multi-processor systems leading the charge for real-time
performance. Spectrum Signal Processing¹s flexible line of parallel
SHARC products and advanced suite of software development tools can
simplify your development, debugging, and optimization of real-time
multi-processor applications. Let us show you how.
Spectrum will demonstrate:
€Apex-Pro -eases software development by providing a communication
infrastructure to automatically route data packets between processors
with minimal overhead, eliminating the need for low-level link-port
programming
€Apex-Debug - a fully interactive graphical debug and optimization tool
that simultaneously provides information on each SHARC's memory
contents, call stack traceback, and link communication statistics
€Apex-Trace development tools - allow users to simultaneously view the
each processor¹s activity on the network, including computational
loading and link-port traffic. Apex-Trace is also an invaluable tool for
identifying data-flow errors and bottlenecks in complex parallel
systems.
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Spectrum Signal Processing Inc.
(NASDAQ NMS: SSPIF / TSE: SSY), the industry leader in high-performance
DSP systems, announces it will support Analog Devices¹ new 32-bit,
floating-point, multiprocessing DSP, the ADSP-21160. With the recent
acquisition of Alex Computer Systems, experts in massive parallel
processing hardware and software, Spectrum is very committed to
developing complete DSP system solutions based on the next generation
21160 chip. The Company is also enhancing its existing specialized sof
tware to support this new DSP.
Many of Spectrum¹s customers will use this type of DSP chip in systems
with very large parallel processing requirements. Radar, shipboard
sonar, diagnostic imaging, vision systems, and radio surveillance are
examples of applications which often have massive parallel processing
requirements and may need a ADSP-21160 to meet the demands of these
applications.
Strong complementary software is the key to developing a large parallel system with the ADSP-21160, and Spectrum intends to offer software solutions that will easily facilitate code and application development for this type of high-performance system. 3L Limited¹s real-time operating system software, Diamond (best suited for developing parallel DSP systems), will be enhanced with the very successful software products APEX-Pro and APEX-Debug, previously sold through Alex Computer Systems, with features specific to SHARC-based code development. This combination along with Spectrum¹s internal debug, library, RTOS and system level software development will allow the Company to offer complete hardware and software systems to customers looking for off-the-shelf solutions.
³Analog Devices¹ new high-performance, 32-bit, floating-point, DSP the
ADSP-21160, has five times the performance of the current SHARC
processor, and is code compatible, allowing our customers a seamless
migration to the new processor,² comments Andrew Talbot, Business
Development Manager, Spectrum Signal Processing (formerly President of
Alex Computer Systems). ³Migrating to the 21160 will allow our customers to retain their software investment by reusing existing code and software libraries thereby speeding their time-to-market with a seamless move to Analog Devices¹ latest parallel processing DSP.²
With the integration of Alex Computers¹ specialized software products,
Spectrum now offers a new suite of software tools - the APEX product
line, specifically designed for high-performance, massively parallel
SHARC-based applications. These tools include APEX-Debug, a system level post-mortem debug analysis tool which provides the engineer very
detailed information on the final state of each DSP before a programming error occurred, and APEX-Pro, an advanced programming environment that simplifies parallel application development while retaining highly efficient and optimized code.
The 21160¹s large internal memory blocks, multiple internal bus
structure, and integrated I/O subsystem, possess all the features
necessary to build very large parallel systems that provide true
scalability to any number of processors. Spectrum plans to develop
modular VME, PCI, and SHARCPAC hardware products based on the ADSP-21160 SHARC DSP, allowing customers greater flexibility and scalability when developing very large, high-performance, parallel DSP systems.
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With the new APEX-Pro professional SHARC development tools, Spectrum can now offer the most advanced native software development environment in the business. Highlights include a sophisticated inter-processor communication infrastructure, fully integrated and extendible host interface software, plus a variety of high-level visual tools for system configuration and diagnostics.
APEX-Pro is complemented by a powerful, multiprocessor debugger known as
APEX-Debug.
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Features include a completely interactive (Win32) GUI front-end, true
multiprocessor support across any number of boards, and complete
integration with APEX-Pro's system-level data-routing structures.
APEX-Debug is not a JTAG-based debugger and therefore requires no
additional hardware. With an aim at helping customers debug and optimize large, complex systems at the application level, APEX-Debug has become one of the most powerful parallel SHARC application development tools available today.
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The Cutting-Edge DSP RTOS 3L Diamond for SHARC is a high performance
real-time operating system that simplifies the development of portable, modular applications while retaining hard real-time performance. Diamond adds two key components to Analog Devices¹ standard C compiler tools: a distributed, real-time microkernel that supports tasks, threads, timers and pre-emptive priority scheduling; and powerful inter-processor message-switching software that provides end-to-end virtual connections over an underlying packet-switched network. Tasks can be moved from processor to processor transparently, the topology altered with no change in source code. Diamond even makes the C compiler itself easier to use, with improved linker technology that eliminates the need for application programmers to manually allocate memory addresses for program sections, and full support for ANSI C functions. With minimum memory requirements and highest possible performance, Diamond accelerates and simplifies your development project resulting in faster time-to-market, a longer life cycle, and lower overall system costs.
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Regards
Norden |
