Gene Frantz
TI Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager, DSP

Another comment we received recently was from Shreshtha Kumar, questioning all of our hype around DaVinci technology and what is new about it. Again this is something, I wanted to talk to and as always I welcome your feedback on my thoughts. Kumar wrote, “SOC concept is not new. It is here for quite a few years but it complex nature sticts (sic) its rapid development. Here comes DaVinci for rescue.”

DaVinci is as much a recognition of the movement of the DSP market as it was a platform announcement and the introduction of new devices. The market that seems to be happening is video and imaging. Let me give you some background on the market trend. When we introduced the TMS32010 in 1982 (yes, 25 years ago next year) it had a performance level of about 5 MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second). If we put it in terms of instruction cycles per sample period of a telecom system, it was 625 instruction cycles per sample period. That was enough to do some amazing things. But, if you look at the performance of our modern DSPs you find that we have hundreds of thousands of instruction cycles per sample period. What these additional instructions per sample period gave us were better vocoders, reduction of unwanted noise, elimination of echoes and lower data rate vocoders.

At the same time in 1982, there were about 100 instructions cycles per sample period for an audio signal. Since then, that number of instruction cycles per sample period has increased to tens of thousands. With this added performance, we have been able to go from manorial sound to stereo sound to surround sound to room correction and so on.

What we have found in the past few years that the performance of our DSPs has increased enough to do the same for video that it did for telecom and audio. With DaVinci devices, we can now provide thousands of instruction cycles per pixel period for Standard Definition video and about 100 instruction cycles per pixel period for High Definition displays. That means we are at the beginning of a similar innovation cycle for video that we say for telecommunications and audio.

As for SoC, I agree, it has been around a long time. In fact, when I joined Texas Instruments in 1974 we were doing it then. I was in the calculator division of TI, and we were driving for a single chip calculator (yes, we would call it an SoC today). What is new is the good news and bad news that IC process technology brings to the concept of SoC. The good news is that we are (virtually) without limit on the number of transistors we can put on an SoC. The bad new is that it costs more money than just about anyone can afford. Therefore, then new twist on SoCs is that the “S” is more likely to stand for “Software” than “System.” That is, to make the advantages of “SoC” available to virtually everyone, we must take a programmable approach. This allows hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities to use the same silicon without incredibly expensive new IC designs.

The fun of opening a new market is the explosion of innovation at all levels. We have chosen to create a generation of SoCs, surrounded by optimized software and development tools, called DaVinci technology, to address this new explosive market of video and imaging. We believe to do it well, it takes the right mix of IP on the silicon, the right mix of software IP that runs on the silicon, the right development environment and the right independent sources for development support. All of this makes up DaVinci technology.

It isn’t over for us either. We will continue to innovate to make it easier for our systems innovators to do their thing. We are at the beginning of some exciting times. Oh, by the way, I’m off looking at what else our customers can do with DaVinci technology (and our other platforms) that has never been done before. Yes, there is life beyond video and imaging, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 5:59 pm and is filed under DSP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.