Adelante unveils first family in series of reconfigurable DSP cores

Adelante unveils first family in series of reconfigurable DSP cores
By Darrell Dunn, EBN
March 7, 2002 (4:15 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020307S0048

San FRancisco

Less than a year after being formed through the merger of the DSP division of Philips Semiconductors and Frontier Design, Adelante Technologies will introduce today at the Embedded Systems Conference its first technology, the Galaxic DSP architecture.

Galaxic DSP will eventually consist of several families of reconfigurable DSP cores, the first of which is Saturn, a family of extendible cores optimized for such applications as wireless handsets, speech recognition, and hard disk controllers, said Mike Bloemenball, director of the Leuven, Belgium-based company.

"We're a new company but we're certainly not a start-up," Bloemenball said. "Through Philips and Frontier Design we have inherited a substantial customer base and have shipped more than 100 million devices."

The Saturn core is manufactured on an 0.18-micron CMOS process, measures 0.5 sq. mm, and consumes 0.25mW per MHz. With a typical clock frequency of 210MHz, t he core can deliver up to 12 operations per cycle and execute 420 million MAC operations per second.

Adelante is also offering six co-processors, including a 3G turbocoder, 802.11a baseband, Viterbi, FFT, and ADPCM codec. Additional co-processors are under development, Bloemenball said.

The Saturn core and co-processors, as well as related subsystems, are available for licensing.