October 1, 2000

Cool cores
DSP designs target cellular phones

DSPs drive untold numbers of convergence applications—basically anywhere communications or streaming media are involved. Courtesy of StarCore, designers will soon have another alternative when looking for that elusive perfect match of performance, cost, memory requirements, and battery life.

StarCore is a research organization bankrolled by Motorola and Lucent Technologies and charged with developing DSP cores that both investors can use in products. Previously, StarCore developed the SC140 core, which has four on-chip, parallel, math-processing units and targets high-end applications in communications infrastructure equipment. Now the company has introduced the SC110, which has a single math unit and targets lower-performance, lower-power applications, such as cellular handsets.

The company's main talking point: the SC110 and SC140 are unique in that they are 100 percent software compatible. That means convergence teams using the cores can employ the same software tools and expertise, whether the application is a portable appliance or a wireless base station.

StarCore claims the design will allow Motorola and Lucent to challenge Texas Instruments' dominance in cellular handsets as the industry moves to 2.5G and 3G systems. The 16-bit design minimizes memory requirements in such applications. And StarCore claims the design's low power consumption (90 milliwatts for a 300-MHz design) is the lowest in the DSP industry.

StarCore's real challenge could come when Motorola and Lucent try to adapt and deploy the technology. Within a single R&D environment at TI, the chip designers control both the DSP and other necessary cores, such as RISC microcontrollers, that often get integrated onto a single chip. While StarCore can access intellectual property from both its investors, it faces a design process that's surely more cumbersome than that within a unified organization.

—Maury Wright