Simplify your high-performance fixed-point designs |
Digital baseband for wireless system designIndustry's first standard-independent, single-chip platform combines 'C54x and ARM coresTI has released a new single-chip DSP Solution that integrates all the digital baseband functions required for digital wireless telephones and supports using any transmission standard. The standard- independent TI digital baseband platform helps manufacturers reduce the size, weight, component costs, and power consumption in digital cellular phones, digital cordless phones, two-way voice/data pagers, and other types of wireless communications systems. At the heart of the TI digital baseband platform is a TMS320C54x DSP core which handles the voice coding, channel coding, error correction, equalization, demodulation, and encryption functions. The 'C54x DSP core features include a Viterbi accelerator, four internal buses and dual-address generators to enable multiple operand operations, a 40-bit adder and two 40-bit accumulators to facilitate parallelism, single-cycle normalization and exponential encoding, and single-cycle instructions including 17-bit unsigned multiplication. In the TSC5000 ASIC backplane, the TMS320C54x core operates at 100 MIPS at 2.5V. The accompanying power dissipation is 0.59 mA/MHz. These features, and others including power-down modes, make the TMS320C54x DSP core well-suited for digital wireless systems. A 16-bit/32-bit c470 microcontroller core based on the ARM7TDMI (Thumb(tm)) core licensed from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. (ARM) handles more general system control, such as mobility management and the man-machine interface. The c470 ARM7TDMI microcontroller core can operate in two modes with 75 MHz of performance: 32-bit instructions for faster execution and 16-bit instructions for high code density. The 16-bit capability saves a remarkable amount of memory space and could result in a reduction of the customer's system costs. The 0.25-micron version, operating at 2.5V, is only 2.0 square millimeters on the die (about one-third the size of similar cores) and dissipates only 0.36 mA/MHz. Because the DSP, microcontroller cores, and the logic gates can be programmed to support any digital wireless standard, the TI digital baseband platform can be used to design systems in any region of the world. In order to accelerate customer time-to-market, TI also has a library of various DSP and MCU software modules, as well as ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) hardware peripherals that can be licensed to customers to support various worldwide standards. Both cores are supported by extensive suites of TI development tools and are accessible for in-circuit emulation (ICE) through an IEEE 1149.1/JTAG test port. Special on-chip logic allows simultaneous co-emulation of both cores with a single set of emulation hardware. This unique, proprietary co-emulation capability can save designers months of development time, speeding time-to-market. The TI digital baseband platform is ready for current engagements from Texas Instruments for use in high-volume digital wireless communications designs. Non-recurring engineering costs and pricing varies based on each customer's specific design configuration. For more information, see the Digital Baseband technical brief. |