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TI’s Programmable DSP For Digital Cameras

Texas Instruments is now sampling its latest programmable DSP, which it says enables faster operation with lower power consumption in digital cameras and offers performance increases of up to 100 percent and a reduction in power consumption of up to 25 percent over its previous latest and greatest DSP. The TMS320DSC25 programmable DSP supports the capture of still images at up to 3-megapixels in less than a second, and encodes and decodes CIF resolution (352x288) MPEG-4 I+P frame video at 20 frames per second (fps). Additional power-down modes provide a reduction in overall system power consumption and prolonged battery life. The DSP adds an external host interface and SD, Multi-media Card (MMC) and Memory Stick interfaces. The DSC25 is manufactured using a 0.15-micron (SIA) CMOS process and features a digital liquid crystal display (LCD) interface and S-video output. An enhanced on screen display (OSD) provides a simplified graphical user interface (GUI) development environment for system designers with dedicated video, bitmap and cursor windows, and its improved preview engine offers faster memory access and image resizing (remember that we’re comparing it to its older sibling). Direct memory access (DMA) to external dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and an external host interface are provided for PC-related applications. TI says that software modules will be available for all major video-imaging compression standards, including JPEG, motion-JPEG, MPEG, MPEG-4, H.263, and audio standards like MP3 and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), as well as data communication standards including USB and RS-232. Samples of TI's DSC25 DSP solution are available now, with volume production currently scheduled for Spring 2002. Evaluation modules are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2002. In quantities of 100 thousand units or more, the DSC25 is expected to be priced at less than $20.

http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-20011024.html.