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Advanced Imaging and Video Applications Demand Best in Class Real-Time Performance, Scalability and Ease of Use Found in TMS320C6000™ Programmable DSPs from Texas Instruments
As networks today increasingly combine voice and data delivery, demand is emerging for video information to be provided in the same high-speed digital stream. At the same time, traditional imaging applications need ever-greater performance, intelligence and ease of design to achieve new goals in visual inspection, surveillance and image-analysis type applications. The TMS320C6000 platform of digital signal processors (DSPs) from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) is designed to meet the needs of these systems, delivering the highest available real-time programmable performance for streaming video and advanced imaging applications, together with the industry's most comprehensive integrated development environment.
Imaging and video applications
Imaging and video applications are different, though to some extent overlapping, ways of using visual information. In this context, imaging refers to the manipulation, analysis, synthesis and processing of pictures or images, while video refers to the real-time capture, transmission and display of vast numbers of moving image frames in a related sequence. Imaging applications include, though they are not limited to, medical uses such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer-aided tomography (CAT) scans; machine inspection and recognition used in industrial robotics, navigation, surveillance and defense; three-dimensional graphics modeling for games, entertainment, training simulation, and scientific areas such as seismic exploration and weather prediction; and more everyday uses such as printers, scanners and digital cameras.
Video is familiar as TV and recorded video, but it extends to videoconferencing, surveillance and other areas where there is input from one or more live cameras as well. End-user applications include videoconferencing, videophones, video-on-demand, digital TV, DVDs, set-top boxes, interactive games, advertising, third-generation (3G) wireless multimedia solutions and other forms of digital video broadcast, recording and playback. In all of these cases, visual information must be captured digitally or converted to a digital format, then transmitted in a data stream in order to be used.
Requirements of video and imaging
Imaging and video have in common the need to process enormous amounts of pixel data. For video, this processing must usually take place in real time. The real-time constraint is not always present with imaging, but getting results quickly is invariably a requirement. Real-time response is complicated by the limitations of storage space and medium bandwidth, which force visual data to be compressed and decompressed--operations that are processing-intensive and potentially time-consuming.
Image analysis applications, such as networked camera surveillance systems, demand greater intelligence and real-time processing capabilities. The integration of multiple image sources, such as multiple camera inputs, requires increasing levels of performance. Typical processing involves image/video compression, object recognition, tracking and profiling.
The transmission of video brings additional requirements. Video servers, for instance, must control the admission of users, handle user requests, store and retrieve data, and compress, encode and encrypt the data in a separate streaming channel for each request. Frequently, video data must be transcoded or transrated at video gateways during transmission to meet different formats or protocols. These and other requirements, such as handling the quality of service (QoS) levels that make real-time video delivery possible in a packet framework, demand the highest possible performance from video network infrastructure equipments.
A DSP architecture designed for video and imaging
The TMS320C6000 DSP platform, offering high performance, programmability and scalability, is extremely well suited for the needs of advanced imaging and streaming video applications. The VelociTI™ advanced very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture supports execution of up to eight instructions simultaneously. This high level of parallelism is ideal for the high-speed, repetitive pixel manipulations inherent in video and imaging.
The processing performance, high I/O bandwidth and system-level integration of C6000™ DSPs are essential to the development of dense, scalable, multi-protocol video infrastructure systems. For advanced imaging developers, the C6000 provides an easy-to-use image-processing engine that is well suited for pixel-related operations, and a C-friendly programming development environment with the flexibility required for the creation of cost-effective, expandable systems.
Nine-code compatible devices in the TMS320C62x™ family offer a wide range of memory, peripheral and performance options. Clock speeds up to 300Mhz provide 2400 MIPS of performance with up to 7Mbits of on-chip SRAM and multiple serial and parallel interfaces. The TMS320C6211 features a multi-level memory system with an enhanced DMA controller for optimum performance from large imaging and video data sets. Current C62x™ DSPs offer outstanding performance for imaging applications including: MPEG-4 Simple Profile encode and decode at 30fps CIF (352x288 4:2:0) resolution; MP@ML MPEG-2 video decode at 30fps; H.263 encode at approximately 50fps CIF resolution.
TMS320C64x™ DSP core scales beyond 1 GHz
The newest development in the C6000 architecture is the family of DSPs based on the recently released C64x™ core, which is capable of scaling to speeds faster than 1 Gigahertz (GHz) and performance nearing 9,000 million instructions per second (MIPS). Code compatible with existing C62x devices, the high level of performance provided by the C64x offers room for growth as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) increase channel density and speed in future generations of their products. Because the C64x instruction set is a superset of TI's earlier C62x fixed-point instruction sets, OEMs can directly port the object code they have developed for their previous-generation designs. In addition, the C64x architecture includes more than 10 instruction extensions that are specific to operations used frequently in video and imaging, helping to simplify software development and providing greater efficiency in execution for programs used in these systems.
A few key illustrations show the power of the C64x DSP core for multi-channel video and imaging applications. A single C64x core is capable of simultaneously decoding more than five MP@ML MPEG-2 video channels, or type-1 transrating of up to eight channels of MPEG-2 video bit-streams. Or the core can perform MPEG-4 encoding and decoding on CIF resolution data at 30 frames/sec while also performing MP@ML MPEG-2 video decoding, and still having more than 50 percent of its performance left for other uses.
Support for imaging and video development
TI's eXpressDSP™ real-time software technology allows developers of imaging and video applications to get products to market faster. The four key components of eXpressDSP real-time software technology include Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE), the industry's most complete integrated development environment, DSP/BIOS real-time software kernel, the TMS320™ DSP Algorithm Standard and hundreds of products from the industry's largest third party network.
As part of the Code Composer Studio IDE, the highly efficient C6000 C compiler provides key DSP kernel performance of over 80% of what could be achieved with hand-coded assembly, enabling programmers to be productive fast. Developers can rapidly create new software and modify existing software --an important capability in the rapidly evolving fields of video and imaging. The profile-based compiler evaluates control functions embedded in the software to help developers make important decisions about tradeoffs between code size and performance in their applications, providing even greater efficiency. With tools such as these, programmers can focus their efforts on areas of system design that mean the most in terms of robust performance and feature differentiation.
TI recently moved to help "jump start" the development of advanced imaging and video systems with the introduction of the TMS320C6000 Imaging Developer's Kit (IDK). Providing an easy-to-use environment for rapid system prototyping, the IDK brings together all the hardware and software elements needed to develop advanced video and imaging applications based on C6000 DSPs. Included in the kit are a TMS320C6711- 150 Mhz based DSP board, an add-on daughter board for handling high-speed video I/O, NTSC/PAL compatible camera, video and imaging application demonstration programs, application software utilities and example programs and the Code Composer Studio IDE. A wide range of additional software modules are also planned for availability from the world's largest network of DSP third party developers in areas such as MPEG-4, JPEG 2000 and MPEG-2 video.
High performance for tomorrow's visual information
As communications develop in the next few years, video will become an increasingly larger stream in the river of converged digital data. At the same time, image processing is opening new possibilities of intelligence in the inspection and analysis of visual information. Video infrastructure and advanced imaging systems alike need the high real-time performance, scalable architecture, programming ease and efficiency, and comprehensive support offered by C6000 DSPs. For video infrastructure equipment, these capabilities often translate into support for more channels and more protocols in less space, while for imaging applications; C6000 features provide the means for faster development of new systems with breakthrough capabilities. However, developers may choose to work with visual information, they can find the solutions they need in advanced C6000 high-performance DSPs from TI.
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