Texas Instruments Inc. today said it has reached volume production with its 1GHz DSPs, purported to be the first DSPs manufactured on 90nm process technology.

TI said that by moving to its 90nm CMOS process technology and 1GHz speeds allows processing of up to eight channels of MPEG-2 video transrating, 64 universal and up to 128 simple voice ports in telecom infrastructure applications on a single device.

Further, by migrating the 720MHz versions of these devices to its 90nm CMOS process, TI believes it has achieved a 50 percent price reduction for customers versus the 130nm 720MHz devices.

Achieving these performance levels in a single chip could allow developers to avoid complexities of multi-processor designs and is also well suited for data and voice packet telephony applications.

"We are seeing aggressive customer adoption of 90nm," said Thomas Brooks, DSP marketing manager. "We are already shipping to more than 70 customers. Customer adoption will accelerate now that we are in full production."

The DSPs have 1MByte of on-chip high-speed memory and high-speed peripherals to accelerate processing of real-time data, built around a DSP core that can execute four parallel 16-bit MAC units (eight 8-bit MAC units for video applications). The devices include a 64-channel enhanced direct memory access controller that delivers input/output efficiency that manages data transfer from system memory at gigabytes per second, three multi-channel buffered serial ports each supporting 128 time-division multiplex channels as well as AC97 and IIS audio interfaces, and on-board Viterbi and Turbo coprocessors on the C6416T to further improve the channel capacity of communications infrastructure systems.

The 90nm CMOS process contains more than 65 million transistors on this DSP, which can also support transistors as small as 37nm and deliver up to a 50 percent improvement in transistor performance over its fastest 130nm transistor, the company said.

These 1GHz DSPs are manufactured on 200mm, copper wafers but will soon also be available on its 90nm DMOS6 300mm process, the Dallas-based chip giant added.

“TI is experiencing a lot of demand for these 90nm devices to enable higher channel density in communications infrastructure, a market that has been traditionally very strong for the TMS320C64x generation of DSPs as well as the exploding market of video infrastructure,” said Gene Frantz, principal fellow at TI, in a statement.

Frantz believes that many innovative future applications exist for such DSPs. TI is focusing on three areas, transportation, lifestyle enhancement and education. For example, in transportation, the autonomous car is one application that is getting attention. And in lifestyle enhancement, the University of Southern California is working on an artificial vision application to provide some limited sight abilities to the blind.

By: DocMemory
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