Freescale all set to unseat rivals

ssPORTLAND: When the Embedded Systems Conference takes place in San Jose, California, on 26 April, Freescale Semiconductor will go gunning for Texas Instruments.

Freescale claims its latest high-end digital-signal processors, based upon the SC3850 StarCore DSP core, offering almost double the performance, for half the price, of similar TI DSPs. 

TI has for long been the king of the hill in DSPs, although Freescale has aggressively been intensifying its own technology to overthrow its competitor.

Freescale's latest MSC825x family is the first to arrive at the 45-nanometer process node, allowing lesser price, in addition to the line apparently adds both performance and features. 

John Dixon, media and DSP marketing manager at Freescale said “Our six-core DSP is two times the performance of the highest-performance DSP you can purchase from TI but costs about 40 percent less,". 

Freescale's scalable architecture facilitates the low-end, single-core, $75 MSC8251, although the identical software in addition runs on the dual-core MSC8252, four-core MSC8254 and eight-core MSC8256 ($135). The DSPs are by now being designed into high-performance applications in fields including medical, aerospace and test/measurement applications. 

The DSPs all fit the same pinout, in spite of of core count, and make use of the same development software, that includes the capability to decode TI's DSP codes to Freescale code.. 

The CodeWarrior development software consists of C++, a source-level debugger, core and device simulators, software analysis plug-ins and the royalty-free SmartDSP-OS operating system.

Production is scheduled for this fall, although developers can get started today using the software-compatible MSC8156 model.