ADSP-21479:  High Performance Fourth Generation DSP

The fourth generation of SHARC® Processors, now includes the low power floating point DSP products – the ADSP-21478 and ADSP-21479 and offers increased performance, hardware-based filter accelerators, audio and application-focused peripherals, and new memory configurations capable of supporting a single chip solution. All devices are pin-compatible with each other and completely code-compatible with all prior SHARC Processors. These newest members of the fourth generation SHARC Processor family are based on a single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) core, which supports both 32-bit fixed-point and 32-/40-bit floating-point arithmetic formats and their low power make them particularly suitable for battery powered applications or where a higher ambient operating temperature is required.

The ADSP-21479 offers a very low power and high performance – 266 MHz/1596 MFLOPs – in a BGA and LQFP package within the fourth generation SHARC Processor family. This feature of power makes the ADSP-21479 particularly well suited to address the automotive audio and many industrial control segments where low power is a requirement. In addition to its high core performance, the ADSP-21479 includes additional processing blocks such as FIR, IIR, and FFT accelerators to increase the total performance of the system. There is a new feature called Variable Instruction Set Architecture (VISA) that allows the code size to be decreased by 20% to 30% and increase the memory size availability. The fourth generation DSP allows the ability to connect to external memory by providing a glueless interface to 16-bit wide SDR SDRAMs.

Fourth-generation SHARC Processors also integrate application-specific peripherals designed to simplify hardware design, minimize design risks, and ultimately reduce time to market. Grouped together, and broadly named the Digital Applications Interface (DAI), these functional blocks may be connected to each other or to external pins via the software-programmable Signal Routing Unit (SRU). The SRU is an innovative architectural feature that enables complete and flexible routing amongst DAI blocks. Peripherals connected through the SRU include but are not limited to serial ports, SPI ports, S/PDIF Tx/Rx, and an 8-Channel asynchronous sample rate converter block. The fourth generation SHARC allows data from the serial ports to be directly transferred to external memory by the DMA controller. Other peripherals such as UART and Two-Wire Interface are routed through a Digital Peripheral Interface (DPI).