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DSPs And Embedded Linux: A Natural Evolution

Consumers Increase Demands On Embedded Devices

In the high-tech industry, the widespread adoption of new enabling technologies is largely driven by consumer demand for expanded features and additional services. Today's consumers, well accustomed to the robust functionality found on their desktop systems, have come to expect this same functionality from their handheld devices. The challenge for developers and OEMs lies in finding a solution that allows them to incorporate such functionality into these devices in the most competitive, cost-effective and timely manner possible.

Some manufacturers of embedded devices are addressing this challenge by simply running their processors at higher clock speeds. The drawback here, of course, is compromising battery life.

Consumer demand for greater functionality, coupled with the needs of OEMs to stay competitive, has forced manufacturers to rethink the technology behind their embedded devices. Many are turning to embedded Linux as the solution.

DSP+ARM+Linux

Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) already form the core of multimedia, wireless networking and broadband devices that require significant real-time processing. DSPs are particularly well suited for multimedia, voice processing, wireless communications, compression and encryption tasks. As the demand for Internet-enabled mobile devices continues to grow, many of these new appliances based on DSP technology will run embedded Linux to take advantage of the operating system's exceptional flexibility, high reliability and ease of Internet connectivity.

DSPs are ideally suited for compute-intensive tasks, and system designers often add them to a system to handle the "hot-spot" processing demands of multimedia. Recognizing this trend, DSP market leader Texas Instruments has introduced the TMS320DSC processor family that combines a DSP core with an ARM processor on a single chip. The DSP+ARM architecture offers developers the best of both worlds: A General Purpose Processor (GPP) that runs Linux and its large base of software well, with a DSP core that executes real-time tasks in parallel. The result is a high-performance processor with lower power requirements and easy programmability.

What It Means For Developers And OEMs

The TI DSP+ARM architecture and the flexibility of Linux enable developers to leverage the strengths of each to dramatically improve the battery life, reliability, memory management and performance of the devices they are designing. Linux has a large base of Open Source software to dramatically reduce time-to-market. New advances in Internet and multimedia standards are often implemented on Linux first. Software that bridges between the DSP and ARM processors makes it easy for developers to use the power of DSPs without requiring expertise in DSP algorithm development. Even generic media-handling capabilities becomes easy to add to devices using open multimedia interfaces that reduce development cycles from weeks or even months to a matter of days.