A successor to Ankoor, "Mantra" to be developed in half the time

BANGALORE: Texas Instruments India Ltd. announced the making of a new Digital

Signal Processor (DSP), which challenges its own Ankoor, the first commercial

DSP. TI India specializes in designing digital and analog integrated circuits,

embedded software and design automation tools. Having created Ankoor, the DSP

team of TI is now all set to make a programmable DSP called "Mantra."

To be fully developed and designed in Bangalore, "It gives more processing

power at much lesser cost and is also smaller than Ankoor," said Srini

Rajam, Managing Director, TI India.

Mantra is supposed to be six to eight times faster than Ankoor and packs 50

per cent more transistors in one-tenth the area. The DSP team plans to complete

it in half the time they took for Ankoor. This chip will provide the solution

for mass storage applications. Under development with six more months to go

before it hits the market, Mantra can be used in robotics, uninterrupted power

supplies (UPS) and high-density hard disk drives. Mantra’s silicon samples

should be available to the initial customers in the fourth quarter of 2000.

Ravi Shanker, GM of DSP Software tools in TI India, states, "As part of

the code composer development tool set, the team in Bangalore has developed the

Mantra Simulator which provides easy access to the Mantra architecture to

application developers. This is part of eXpress DSP — TI’s DSP software

framework." Adds Rajam, "Manta is the next generation core in TI’s

TMS320C2000 platform which provides the most control optimized DSPs in the

world. Coupled with TI’s Code Composer Software development tools and analog

support chips, Mantra will provide unprecedented design capability for control

applications leaving plenty of performance headroom for system innovation."