Home > What's New > Upper Saddle River, NJ - October 30, 1998

Pentek Is First to Ship Quad 'C6701 and Quad 'C6201B DSP Boards

Quad 'C6701 Floating Point Board Delivers 4 GFLOPS Quad 'C6201B Fixed Point Board Delivers 6400 MIPS with Reduced Power Consumption Wide Range of High Performance I/O Options with VIM Mezzanines

Shattering performance barriers twice in a single week, Pentek leads the industry by delivering the first quad processor DSP boards using the two latest DSP chips from Texas Instruments, the world's leader in DSP solutions. The first board, Pentek's Model 4291, features four TMS320C6701 floating point DSP's capable of delivering 4 GFlops of peak horsepower. The second board, the Model 4290, uses the reduced-power TMS320C6201B revision 3.0 fixed point DSP and boasts of 6400 MIPS.

These boards represent a tenfold increase in processing density over currently available products and enable advanced, next-generation applications including wireless local loop base stations, beam-forming systems, virtual reality 3-D graphics, voice mail, speech recognition, audio, radar, industrial control, atmospheric modeling, finite element analysis, imaging and MRI.

Both boards feature the latest 0.18 micron process silicon devices shipped only within the last few weeks from Texas Instruments. Supply voltage for the processor core drops from 2.5 volts to 1.8 volts, resulting in a 3- to 4-fold drop in typical power dissipation over the 0.25 micron process used in previous 'C6201 devices. This allows full speed operation with no special cooling provisions, especially important for high-density, multi-processor boards.

Sharing an identical architecture designed for maximum flexibility in open-architecture embedded applications, these two 6U VMEbus boards are equipped with numerous memory resources and a multitude of extremely high-speed peripheral interfaces.

Investment in Common Architecture Pays Off

"Texas Instruments strategy of offering identical architectures for both fixed- and floating-point DSP chips is an industry first," said Rodger Hosking, vice president, Pentek, Inc. "Now they've delivered on it. This compatibility allowed us to drop the new 'C6701 chips right into our existing quad 'C6201 board and have it up and running in two days!"

Not only are the two chips pin compatible, they share the same set of DSP development tools, including TI's optimizing C compiler, assembler, and simulator, the Code Composer debugger, Pentek's SwiftNet software drivers as well as numerous third party offerings.

Scalable Local Memory Resources

Each 'C6x processor node features three local memory selections: the zero-wait state SB SRAM for critical data or program code up to 512 kBytes; the single-wait state SDRAM providing a large, fast 16 MByte work space, and the 256 kByte Dual Port SRAM allows each 'C6x to move data efficiently to and from the VMEbus. These size of the resources can be scaled to minimize costs for production volume applications.

Two Types of High Speed FIFOs

Synchronous, bi-directional first-in, first-out memories (Bi-FIFOs) support simultaneous, 32-bit parallel transfers between each of the four processor nodes. In addition, four more Bi-FIFOs connect each processor node to its mezzanine connector to support high-speed I/O at rates up to 400 MB/sec.

Broad Selection of Shared Interface and Memory Resources

The global bus acts as the data path to shared slave resources including the four DP SRAMs, the global SRAM, the NV SRAM, the boot/user FLASH. These memory features allow all four processors to share data and non-volatile parameters as well as access boot-up code and self-test routines during board initialization. Memory-mapped access to these shared resources is available to all four C6x's and to the VMEbus through the VME64 slave interface.

VIM Mezzanine Boards for Numerous I/O Functions

VIM (Velocity Interface Mezzanine) is a mezzanine structure designed to deliver maximum I/O connectivity to the Texas Instruments 'C6x family. The VIM connector for each processor includes two buffered serial ports operating at up to 50 Mbits/sec, a 32-bit parallel Bi-FIFO channel operating at up to 400 Mbytes/sec and a 32-bit data/address port for status and control. VIM modules are available in quad or dual processor form factors and occupy the same VMEbus slot as the 'C6x processor boards. VIM modules include data acquisition functions, FPGA, T1/E1 telecom, parallel I/O, RACEway, A/D and D/A converters, high-speed serial links, digital receivers and codecs. A 'C40 comm port VIM module immediately opens up more than 30 comm port based peripherals to these 'C6x platforms.