A236 parallel DSP chip provides real-time video processing economically and efficiently
Steven G. Morton · 2002
Oxford Computer's A236 parallel digital signal processor chip is flexible, fully programmable and designed to compactly and inexpensively provide live video capture, processing and display. The use of single-chip, parallel processing with integrated data and instruction caches, and an inexpensive, high performance memory system, provide high performance at low cost. An extended, single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture with one, 24-bit scalar processor and four, 16-bit vector processors, is used. Five instructions are issued each clock cycle with a 40 MHz clock, providing up to 200 MIPS. Two, 16-bit, bi-directional, double-buffered, DMA ports support simultaneous video acquisition and display, and interface directly to common video decoder and encoder chips with no glue logic. A minimum system that provides all input and output frame buffering contains only three chips, an A236 Chip, a 32-bit wide, synchronous DRAM, and a serial I/sup 2/C EEPROM, plus analog video interface chips. A full set of software development tools that runs under MS Windows is available free, including an enhanced C-compiler that provides a simple method for representing parallel operations on data structures. An evaluation kit containing the software tools and the A236 Video Processing System I is also available.