Texas Instruments (TI) extends its legacy of digital signal processor (DSP) innovation with a single-processor solution for the mass storage industry with the introduction of the TMS320C27x. Having adopted TI's first-to-market DSP solutions for the mobile hard disk drive (HDD) market (1994) and 3.5" mainstream desktop market (1996), designers of all hard disk drives and other high density storage products such as digital video disk (DVD) and high-density floppy can now realize the dream of creating no-compromise uniprocessor solutions for drive electronics. Such devices will meet ever increasing needs for higher performance while taking advantage of advances in integration and lower costs offered by continually improving semiconductor processes.

Speeding Controller Firmware Development

Preservation of drive engineering investment from product generation to generation also plays a significant role in the design of the RISC microcontroller aspects of the 'C27x core. First of all, the most common high level language in use – C was adopted. In fact, the optimized C compiler provided with the core is one of the most efficient available, producing up to 30 percent better code density than typical MCU compilers for common mass storage algorithms, significantly reducing system costs. Time-consuming assembly programming can be virtually eliminated.

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