The TMS320C32 broke the $10 barrier for floating point DSP in 250,000 unit quantities, when it was released in 1995. Today, Texas Instruments makes its unique benefits (floating point performance, fast time-to-market, and low cost) available to all designers regardless of their volumes. The already popular C32 (40MHz), now priced at $9.95 for one unit, enables any designer to develop cost effective end equipments in record time and win in their market place.

TI is committed to floating-point DSP. The TMS320C3x and TMS320C4x product families represent the largest floating-point DSP base in the world. The Third Party network for 'C3x and 'C4x is unmatched in terms of support and the ease of use of TI development tools make 'C3x and 'C4x an ideal development platform.

The TMS320C3x generation is the first of TI's 32-bit floating-point digital signal processors. The 'C3x devices provide an easy-to-use, high-performance architecture, which allows users to develop breakthrough products quickly. 'C3x devices can be used in a wide variety of areas including automotive applications, digital audio, industrial automation and control, data communications, and office equipment such as multifunction peripherals, copiers, laser printers, etc.

The CPU has an independent multiplier and ALU to offer up to 60 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS) and up to 30 MIPS.

The direct memory access (DMA) controller has its own data bus and operates in parallel with the CPU. The DMA controller is programmed to input and output data sets, freeing the CPU for arithmetic operations. The DMA controller can reach anywhere in the memory map, including on-chip, off-chip, and memory-mapped peripheral registers.

The total memory space of the 'C3x is 16 million 32-bit words. Having the data, program, and I/O space contained in this 16M-word address range maximizes memory usage and allows you to allocate the memory space as desired.