DSP improves floating-point performance

Texas Instruments has introduced its latest floating-point DSPs, the TMS320C6722, TMS320- C6726, and TMS320C6727, which include architectural enhancements to better meet the needs of highquality- audio applications. According to Gerard Andrews, DSP-audio-marketing manager at Texas Instruments, “The architectural optimizations to the C672x devices provide as much as an overall 65% increase in performance at the same clock reference than when using earlier C67x floating-point DSPs.” The processor-core enhancements include adding floating-point addition to the S unit on each side of the C67x core, so that the processor can execute four floatingpoint additions per cycle. This doubling of parallel floatingpoint additions per cycle can boost FFT processing by 20%.

In addition to supporting single- and double-precision floating-point operations, the processor core now supports mixed-mode floating-point functions that allow developers to operate on both a single- and double-precision value in the same operation. The C672x DSPs also havetwice as many internal registers as C67x DSPs to improve compiler optimizations and reduce the overall number of memory accesses.

The new DMA engine on these devices supports 1-, 2-, and 3-D transfers and random-offset, multi-tap off-chip accesses. These devices include 32kbytes of instruction cache, as much as 256kbytes of on-chip SRAM, and as many as three McASPs (multichannel audio-serial ports) that can support as many as 16 serializers. Onchip ROM stores the DSP/BIOS, DSPLIB, and Fast- RTS libraries.

These devices are now available for sampling, and production volumes will become available in the fourth quarter of this year. They range in price from $9.95 to$19.95 (10,000). The PADK ( p r o f e s s i o n a l - a u d i o - development kit) is available today from Lyrtech (www. lyrtech. com) for $1995 to provide an evaluation-anddevelopment platform to developers. The PADK integrates a 300MHz C6727 DSP with eight 24-bit, 192kHzsampling- rate Burr-Brown (www.ti.com) ADCs and DACs; a 24-bit coaxial and optical-input and outputdigital port, MIDI (musicalinstrument- digital-interface) input and output, and a USB 2.0 port. The PADK also includes an audio-effects demonstration-softwarelibrary.

—by Robert Cravotta
Texas Instruments,
www.ti.com/c672xpr.