Sundance DSP delivers software support for Texas Instruments’ DSPs, enabling faster time to market

Sundance DSP, a worldwide supplier and manufacturer of advanced digital signal processing and reconfigurable computing platforms, advanced IP cores, libraries and tools, today announced the availability of its software libraries for multicore and single core digital signal processors (DSPs) from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI).

This family of products provides software developers with a comprehensive set of optimized functions that speed development and reduce costs. It eliminates the need to recreate standard functions over and over again and streamline quality control. This software is Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) and plays well into the Department of Defense’s (DoD) policy of procuring COTS components.

The current version of the software supports TI’s KeyStone-based TMS320C66x multicore DSP generation, including the TMS320C665x and TMS320C667x DSPs, as well as the TMS320C674x single core DSPs. The software also supports Sitara™ ARM® Cortex™-A8 with floating-point coprocessor (AM389x, AM387x, AM35x), OMAP-L13x DSP + ARM9™ processors and the DaVinci™ TMS320DM816x and DM814x generation of video processors.

The assembler optimized software libraries for digital signal and image processing and advanced mathematics can be linked and run on any of TI’s C66x/C67x+ DSP cores or on the ARM Cortex-A8 CPU with floating-point co-processor. These hand-tuned libraries provide the highest possible performance on the C674x DSP generation taking full advantage of its powerful, integer and floating-point processing capabilities. Each function has been optimized at the algorithm level to run in the shortest number of cycles for the best possible performance.

At the additional cost of floating-point software simulation, all these libraries are also available for the fixed-point (integer) processors within the C66x DSPs, Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 and DaVinci DM6x video processor generations.

The libraries are targeted at digital signal processing and mathematical programming tasks in the industrial, military, intelligence and commercial markets. They are ideal for software designers who work with advanced mathematical problems such as solutions to linear equations. The libraries provide ready-to-use modules to solve more than 300 different mathematical tasks and problems, including transforms and convolutions, statistics, numerical analysis, matrix and vector operations.

“The new performance levels offered by our current multicore DSPs have opened the doors to many new markets such as high performance computing, cloud computing, imaging and infrastructure,” said Ramesh Kumar, business manager, multicore processors, TI. “With the availability of GDD libraries from Sundance DSP, developers within these markets can now easily design applications at a much faster rate.”

The following libraries are immediately available for use under TI’s Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE) or using shell command line compiler calls

* GDD0300 DSP Vector library
* GDD7000 ECC LINPACK library
* GDD8000 ECC EISPACK library
* GDD9000 ECC BLAS Level 1/2/3 library

A library for solving nonlinear equations, function optimization and nonlinear least squares problems, MINPACK, is also planned.

The GDD0300 DSP Vector library provides a set of functions that perform commonly used DSP operations like Fast Fourier Transform, Fast Hartley Transform, Discrete Cosine Transform, FIR/IIR filters, coordinate transformations, vector operations, complex number arithmetic operations, pseudo-random numbers generation and data conditioning (spectral windows) operations.

The GDD7000 ECC LINPACK library is capable of solving systems of simultaneous equations in demanding scientific and engineering applications like digital signal processing, image processing, radar and communications. The software has been written to handle a wide variety of matrices including triangular, band, Hermitian and Toeplitz. Several types of matrix decompositions like SVD or QR can be performed by the library functions.

The GDD8000 ECC EISPACK library provides a set of functions that find a solution to linear algebraic eigensystems with various matrices, real or complex, general, band, symmetric or Hermitian. All or selected eigenvalues and eigenvectors can be computed. Several types of matrix decompositions like SVD or QR are performed by the library functions.

The GDD9000 ECC BLAS Level 1/2/3 library provides a set of functions that implement the Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines standard for Level 1 BLAS vector-vector (O(n) complexity) operations, Level 2 BLAS matrix-vector (O(n2) complexity) operations and Level 2 BLAS matrix- matrix (O(n3) complexity) operations. The library’s functions perform these operations on the IEEE-754 single and double precision floating-point format numbers. The library uses native floating-point arithmetic support of the C67x DSP, and software simulates floating-point arithmetic for fixed-point TMSC6000™ DSPs. The library processes both real and complex data vectors and matrices.

A set of memory allocation functions provides economical storage for general/structured matrix classes. By using these memory allocation routines the amount of RAM storage is minimized for structured types of matrices, like symmetric, band and triangular classes of matrices.

For a single development seat the price of these libraries range from $5,500 to $9,500. Site license and volume discounts are also available upon request.

About the Texas Instruments Design Network

Sundance DSP is a member of the TI Design Network, a premier group of independent, well-established companies that offer products and system-level design and manufacturing services complementing TI’s semiconductors to a worldwide customer base to accelerate product innovation and time-to-market. Network members provide product design, hardware and software system integration, turnkey product design, RF and processor system modules, reference platforms, software development, proof-of-concept design, feasibility studies, research, certification compliance, prototyping, manufacturing, and product life cycle management. For more information about the TI Design Network, please visit http://www.ti.com/designnetwork.