3DSP unveils optimized VoP software, development kit

3DSP unveils optimized VoP software, development kit
By Darrell Dunn, EBN
July 27, 2001 (12:55 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010725S0088

3DSP Corp. has introduced an optimized voice-over-packet (VoP) software suite and development kit for FPGA-based designs.

The VoP software suite complements 3DSPC's portfolio of licensable DSP cores for use in developing system-level approaches for VoP equipment, said Tom Beaver, who became president and chief executive of the Irvine, Calif., company in January. The software is optimized for 3DSPC's architecture and supports requirements for customer-premise equipment, residential gateways, and next-generation switches, Beaver said.

"We've tended to be a little recession proof. We don't have a warehouse of parts we're going to try and sell whether anyone wants them or not. We've been concentrating on helping customers innovate their way out of this current economic situation," he said.

"Packet telephony is expected to become the fastest-growing market segment for semiconductors over the next decade," Beaver added. "Our technology will be abl e to provide the processing power to manage several hundred phone lines on a single chip."

The suite includes a line-echo canceler that runs at about 3 million processor cycles a second, and a speech coder that runs at 3.5 million cycles a second for encode and decode, about twice as fast as existing DSP solutions, he said.

The licensing fee for the software suite, which can be customized, begins at $20,000.

3DSPC's Sketchpad development kit will support the company's SP-3 or SP-5 configurable DSP cores, Beaver said.

"The kit allows customers to realize a flexible DSP solution using a [Xilinx Inc.] FPGA that is on the board so that they can execute their code and accelerate development," he said. "Before committing to silicon, a customer can download to an FPGA to validate the performance and architectural changes."

The Sketchpad kit begins at $19,950.OR