The rapid changes in wireline and wireless communications, disk drives, home entertainment devices, and computer peripherals are driving demand for 16-bit fixed-point DSPs. Stand-alone DSP chips are no longer cost effective for most of these price-sensitive applications. Instead, there's growing demand for general-purpose 16-bit DSP engines that can be easily designed into highly integrated SOC silicon.
At the same time, the growth of multiple standards and the complexity of these standards is driving developers away from traditional assembly-code programmed DSPs towards integrated architectures that combine excellent DSP performance with generalized high performance when developing with compiled native C control code.
The market needs a DSP engine that can easily be customized if necessary, integrated into a SOC design, and programmed most often in C, rather than assembly code. This will help speed new products to market as quickly as possible.
