The Equator MAP-CA™ DSP: an end-to-end broadband signal processor™ VLIW

  • Authors:
  • C. Basoglu;Woobin Lee;J. O'Donnell

  • Affiliations:
  • Equator Tochnologies Inc., Seattle, WA;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Today's multimedia services, both at the server/headend and the client/consumer end, require high computational performance to support video encoding, decoding, and transcoding. Traditionally, the processing requirements have been met by application-specific processors (ASIC). What once were standalone single-function devices are now network-connected, multifunction service platforms - the Internet-ready digital television/video recorder/teleconference/game platform, for example. As a result, these platforms now must support multiple image formats, compression standards, and processing algorithms. Equator Technologies has developed a high-performance, programmable system on a chip, the MAP-CA digital signal processor (DSP), to address this requirement. The MAP-CA DSP combines general-purpose reduced instruction set computer processing with high-performance image and signal processing in a very long instruction word framework. The chip is designed to replace hardwired ASIC in a variety of products, including digital head-end, networking products, and consumer applications. We present an analysis of the MAP-CA DSP architecture and provide several performance benchmarks with popular media processing applications.