Digital ICs/DSP: Budget-Priced High-Speed DSP Delivers 2000 MMACs At 500 MHz

The TMS320C6412 DSP, available in 500- and 600-MHz speed grades, promises to reduce overall system costs and provide an affordable high-performance solution. The processor packs a rich set of peripherals: an Ethernet media access controller, a PCI port, a host port interface, and up to 288 kbytes of on-chip RAM. Also on-chip are 64 general-purpose 32-bit registers and eight functional units that can compute four 16-bit multiply-accumulates (MACs) per clock cycle. Engineers can start development using the TMS320C6416 DSP starter kit, which contains a development board with 512 kbytes of flash, 16 Mbytes of SDRAM, software tools, and a USB cable to connect to a host PC. The 500-MHz chip costs $32.95 and achieves 2000 million MACs. Samples of the C6412 are available in both 500- and 600-MHz speed grades.