Analog Devices has broadened its new fourth generation SHARC family of high-performance floating-point digital signal processors (DSPs), by introducing a series of processors for industrial and instrumentation, automotive audio and home theatre applications.
Sharing the same design as the pro audio version of the SHARC 21469 introduced last October, at up to 450 MHz/2700 MFLOPS these new processors more than double the total computational performance of the previous SHARC generation. A number of key features across the SHARC 2146x lineup contribute to this impressive performance and I/O throughput, including hardware accelerators, increased on-chip SRAM, a high-speed DDR2 SDRAM external memory interface and link ports.
The new SHARC processors are: the 21469 (industrial temperature range packaging) for industrial and instrumentation; the 21469W, 21465W and 21462W for automotive audio; and the 21467 for home theatre. Like their predecessors, this newest generation is based on a single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) core that supports 32-bit fixed-point as well as 32-/40-bit floating-point arithmetic formats, making them particularly suitable for high-performance applications.
Like the pro-audio-optimised version that debuted last year, these new fourth-generation SHARC processors offer more than two times the 32-bit floating-point family’s performance compared with earlier SHARC offerings. One key contributor to this performance increase is the addition of hardware accelerators for widely used signal processing operations: FIR (finite impulse response), IIR (infinite impulse response), and FFT (fast Fourier transform).
Additional new features include an increase of 60% in on-chip SRAM up to 5 Mbits and a new variable instruction set architecture (VISA) feature that allows a reduction in instruction opcode size, freeing up as much as 30% of memory space for application code. Furthermore, faster I/O throughput is achieved by a high-speed DDR2 SDRAM external memory interface that effectively doubles the data transfer rate. For data transfers between multiple SHARC processors, link ports provide a parallel command interface for faster data movement than is enabled by the processors’ serial peripheral interface (SPI).
Thanks to its high-performance, large on-chip memory, high-speed external memory interface and flexible peripherals – including eight fully independent serial ports – the 21469 provides a strong value proposition for industrial and instrumentation applications that depend on SHARC processors’ realtime deterministic program execution. Designs further benefit from a thermal diode that aids in monitoring die temperature by letting developers set their own parameters with respect to frequency and voltage.
Example industrial and instrumentation applications for the 21469 include power and process control, including any kind of high dynamic range data acquisition; motion control including robotics and intelligent servo drives; and test and measurement including oscilloscopes, signal generators and signal sources.
To help audio developers achieve faster time to market and drive down overall system cost, the new SHARC processors targeted for automotive audio applications (21469W, 21465W, 21462W) and home theatre (21467) complement their next-generation SHARC performance with certified implementations of decoders in on-chip ROM: including DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, and many more.
Additional hardware engines for digital transmission content protection (DTCP) (21465W, 21462W) and sample rate converter (SRC) (all 2146x family members) perform these specialised operations in hardware rather than software, making more core performance available for overall application processing. The 21469W, 21465W and 21462W bring further performance acceleration to in-vehicle applications that use these processors’ integrated MediaLB interface for connecting to automotive MOST (media oriented systems transport) networks.
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