Analog Devices TigerSHARC Processor Named 2003 Innovation of the Year Finalist

FEBRUARY 6--The Analog Devices Inc. (Norwood, MA;www.analog.com) ADSP-TS201 TigerSHARC Processor has been selected as a finalist in the EDN 2003 Innovation of the Year Award competition. This awards program, sponsored by EDN Magazine, is dedicated to honoring products and innovators in the electronics industry.

The key innovations of the ADSP-TS201 TigerSHARC Processor are found in its unique memory structure and balanced architecture, through which the ADSP-TS201 delivers higher levels of performance than competing processors operating at up to twice the frequency. The ADSP-TS201 TigerSHARC includes 24 Mbits of embedded DRAM. The unique memory structure of the ADSP-TS201 significantly increases the speed of the memory and allows the processor to handle datasets four to six times larger than existing devices. The ADSP-TS201 delivers up to 1800 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second) per watt, 85 MFLOPS per dollar, and 3600 MFLOPS per square inch of board space.

The TigerSHARC Processor core directly supports both fixed and floating-point data types. The core also supports a unique set of communication and imaging application-oriented instructions, enabling software implementations of functions that were previously available only through ASICs. The TigerSHARC Processor family features two interface types that directly support scalable multiprocessor systems without the need of costly external logic. The cluster bus allows up to 8 TigerSHARC Processors, a host, and external memory to share a common bus and a global memory map, allowing for a very simple multiprocessing programming model. The link ports are very-high-bandwidth interfaces that allow for point-to-point communication between TigerSHARCs or other devices. The aggregate bandwidth of these interfaces is more than 5 Gbytes/s. Analog Devices provides a complete set of software and hardware development tools that include multiprocessing support.