DSP shipments were tracking at 5% growth for 2002 until shipments in December ballooned. According to market-research company Forward Concepts (www.forwardconcepts.com), this balloon in shipments netted an overall DSP-revenue growth of 14.1% for 2002. Wireless applications, commanding 65.8% of DSP dollars in 2002, remain the market movers for DSP shipments this year. Forward Concepts predicts that semiconductor-market growth this year will not be Òabove normalÓ and forecasts a 20% growth for the DSP market for 2003.
Despite some vendors withdrawing from the DSP market over the last year, this year's directory contains more entries than ever before. StarCore began its existence as a stand-alone company late 2002. The directory no longer lists some products from the member companies of the technology center, such as Agere's StarPro2000. Also, the design team for the Carmel DSP core is now part of StarCore, and the Carmel core is no longer available for licensing. Another DSP-core-design-team move means you can find last year's DSP Group family of cores in the directory under ParthusCeva. To maintain a clear distinction between DSP and controller devices, the directory survey requested devices, cores, or extensions that not only can process signals, but also find primary use in signal processing. The DSPs have to be software-programmable devices, cores, or extensions that include an assembler or a compiler in the tool set. This stipulation eliminates products that, although they may include a programmable DSP core, restrict users to only selecting and setting operating parameters. Also, listed devices or intellectual property must be currently or soon available. Even with these criteria, the directory still grew by 50% from last year.
The directory lists entries alphabetically by vendor and consolidates the development-support section in the last entry for each vendor's section. This structure reduces the amount of duplicate information, and, more important, it emphasizes that tool sets are usually common across a vendor's product lines. Almost without exception, integrated tool sets are a strategic element of any DSP offering and play a large role in design wins. The directory index groups entries by processor size rather than directory location to facilitate the comparison of similar-sized processors.
