By John McHale
UPPER SADDLE RIVER, N.J.- Engineers from Pentek Inc. of Upper Saddle River, N.J., have produced a new scaleable multi-processor VME single-board computer based on the TMS320C 6201 fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP) from Texas Instruments of Stafford, Texas.
Designers can configure the board with one to four TMS320C6201 DSPs to provide more than a billion instructions per second of processing power. A Peripheral Component Interconnect mezzanine card (PMC) site is optional.
The DSP uses advanced very long instruction word architecture, which delivers a 10-fold speed improvement over previous-generation devices, say Pentek officials in a recent statement. It executes eight 32-bit instructions in parallel within a five-nanosecond instruction cycle time yielding 1.6 billion instructions per second.
A single-cycle multiplier, multiple path arithmetic logic unit, and dual channel direct memory access couple to I/O interfaces for solid state memory and serial ports.
The Pentek Model 9134 surrounds each TMS320C6201 with as many as eight megabytes of synchronous dynamic random access memory, one megabyte of Flash RAM, and a E1/T1 digital telecommunications line interface.
Each TMS320C6201 has access to two megabytes of shared global static random access memory which is also memory mapped into VME address space, providing a means for passing data to and from the board.
The 9134 has an industry-standard 32-bit PMC which accommodates a wide selection of high-speed peripheral interfaces from major VMEbus vendors. Front-panel connectors provide several communications port interfaces to the TI TMS320C40 DSP, each operating as fast as 20 megabytes per sec. These ports connect to data acquisition, SCSI, memory boards, and a wide range of TMS320C40 DSP boards.
Applications for Pentek`s new board include modems, echo cancellation, switches, and multi-media systems. The boards are also suited for general-purpose, high-performance signal processing applications such as fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), sonar and radar processing, medical imaging, demodulation, and digital filtering. The complex FFT execution speed for each TMS320C6201 is 70 microseconds.
Pentek supports the Model 9134 with a software development environment including the Texas Instruments C compiler and debugger and Pentek`s Swiftnet interconnection to popular host workstations.
Pentek officials would not comment for this story at the order of Texas Instruments executives.
