Texas Instruments DaVinci

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The Texas Instruments DaVinci Technology combines TI's offering of digital signal processing chips, software, tools and support for developing a broad spectrum of optimized digital video end equipments. The Davinci DSP is part of the popular TMS320 DSP family.


Contents

[edit] Overview

A typical multimedia system such as a digital video recorder or digital camera can be split roughly into two pieces: control and media. The control portion handles tasks such as memory card or hard disk access, user interface, and networking, while the media portion covers tasks such as encoding and decoding of audio and video. A general-purpose processor performs well in control tasks, but all but the fastest of these processors are not sufficiently powerful for intensive media-related tasks such as real-time, high-quality video encoding. A DSP, on the other hand, is superb at the repetitive, easily parallelizable media-related tasks, but usually performs poorly in control-related jobs.

The idea behind the DaVinci family of processors is that by using both a general-purpose processor and a DSP, the control and media portions can both be executed by processors that excel at their respective tasks. The integration of these two components into one chip simplifies the system design and allows for more efficient communication between the two components.

The DaVinci family of processors now scales from multiple core devices (e.g. DM644x) to single core DSP devices (e.g. DM643x) to single core ARM devices (e.g. DM355).

[edit] Peripherals

The DaVinci processor families include a number of on-chip peripherals. Depending on the particular device, these may include:

  • Support for memory cards such as CompactFlash, SD Card and MMC (Although the Linux drivers for the latter two are currently rather impaired and unable to write at a reasonable speed)
  • ATA interface
  • CCD Controller for digital camera/camcorder applications
  • Connectivity, including USB 2.0 Host and Client modes, VLYNQ (interface for FPGA, Wireless LAN, PCI), EMAC (Ethernet MAC) with MDIO
  • GPIO
  • Enhanced DMA
  • Interrupt controller
  • Digital LCD controller
  • Serial interfaces, including SPI, I²C, and I²S, UART
  • Histogram, autofocus, autoexposure, and auto-white-balance (H3A) acceleration
  • Image resize acceleration
  • A/D and D/A converters for analog video input and output

[edit] Models

  • DM6443 - ARM9 + Texas Instruments TMS320C64x+ DSP + DaVinci Video (Decode) - Video Accelerator and Networking for display
  • DM6446 - ARM9 + Texas Instruments TMS320C64x+ DSP + DaVinci Video (Encode and Decode) - Video Accelerator and Networking for capture and display
  • DM6467 - ARM9 + Texas Instruments TMS320C64x+ DSP + DaVinci Video (Encode and Decode) - Video Accelerator and Networking for high def capture and display
  • DM643x - Texas Instruments TMS320C64x+ DSP
  • DM355 - ARM9 + DaVinci Video (Encode and Decode) - Video Accelerator and Networking for capture and display

[edit] Libraries

  • Most the TMS320 DSPs include a TMS320 Chip Support Library (CSL) which is an API used to control the peripherals. However, since the philosophy for the Davinci was to allow the ARM/Linux side to control the peripherals via Linux drivers, support for the CSL on the DM644x (dual core ARM/DSP) is not currently available for the DSP.

[edit] Operating Systems

The DSP included in many DaVinci-based devices generally runs TI's DSP/BIOS RTOS. When multiple, heterogeneous cores are included in the device (e.g. DM644x), DSP/BIOS Link drivers run on both the ARM processor and the DSP to provide communication between the two.

A number of operating systems for the Davinci ARM and support DaVinci and the DSP/BIOS Link drivers:

[edit] External links

[edit] See also