Texas Instruments has sponsored the following story
TI has a range of digital signal processors (DSPs) that are ideal for the intensive processing demands of medical imaging applications. These DSPs are software programmable, which provides a certain level of future-proofing by allowing upgrades without having to change hardware.
Based on the innovative KeyStone architecture, TI offers several devices that incorporate TI's TMS320C66x DSP family, the fastest fixed- and floating-point DSP cores available today.
The C66x DSPs are backward compatible with all existing TMS320C6000 DSPs, and have the highest GMACS and GFLOPS per watt of any high-performance programmable core in the industry.
The TMS320C667x family of devices offers platforms that are expandable from one, two, four and eight core devices and are pin- and software-compatible. Each device can operate at 40 GMACS/20GFLOPS at 1.2GHz and includes 512KB local L2 per core. In addition they offer a large shared on-chip L2 cache that can be used for image manipulation and processing.
Also, the C667x DSPs feature high-bandwidth I/O, which includes 2 lanes of v2 PCIe and four lanes of v2 Serial RapidIO (SRIO). This provides processor-to-processor communications of up to 5Gbaud per lane full-duplex. The CC667x family also supports 4x HyperLink with up to 12.5Gbaud lane rate and 2x SGMII Ethernet ports. This makes multiprocessing architectures easier to achieve by eliminating the need for interface bridge devices, thus lowering overall system cost.
The eight-core TMS320C6678 DSP has up to 320GMACS/160GFLOPS of processing power at 1.2MB, making it ideal for complex imaging applications. In addition, it includes 4MB of shared L2 on-chip cache for image manipulation and processing.
The TMS320C665x family is ideally suited for low-power and power-constrained applications such as portable ultrasound systems. The dual-core TMS320C6657 DSP, when running at 1GHz, delivers 64GMACS/32GFLOPS at 35W, while the single-core TMS320C6654 DPS consumes as little as 2W at 850MHz.
TI has a TMS320C6657 Lite Evaluation Module (EVM), which is an easy-to-use cost-efficient development tool that provides developers a quick start with designs using the C6657, C6655 or C6654 family of DSPs.
TI's 66AK2Hxx family of DSP + ARM system-on-chip SoC) processors reduce development costs and can speed time-to-market. These second generation KeyStone devices incorporate TI's C66x DSPs with multiple ARM Cortex A15 MPCore processors, aiding the development of a wide range of medical imaging applications. This unique combination of Cortex -A15 processors and C66x DSPs, which include built-in packet processing and Ethernet switching, is designed to offload and enhance the increasing number of connected applications in the medical imaging market.
TI's free Multicore Software Development Kit (MCSDK) offers runtime software support for all these devices. This makes migration and development easier. The MCSDK offers core software building blocks, including platform software, a real time operating system (SYS/BIOS), open source Linux operating system, low-level drivers, high-level APIs and optimized algorithm libraries.
The MCSDK includes out-of-the-box demonstration applications and preloaded example projects. This provides a quick start for creating new medical imaging applications on TIs Keystone devices.
Texas Instruments has sponsored promotion of their industrial communications solutions on ENGINEERING.com. They have no editorial input to this post - all opinions are mine. Randy Boulter