Welcome to the 2005 EDN Asia DSP directory. This directory continues to grow at a substantial rate each year-so much so, that this year’s edition, found on the online version of this article at www.ednasia.com, comprises an annual update of companies and products and a comprehensive table listing devices and cores that are available. The table presents DSPmarket offerings in a dense format, highlighting the latest developments in the market and providing an up-todate listing of current and valid processor offerings. Feel free to share your thoughts for making the directory even more useful as the market continues to change.
According to market-research company Forward Concepts (www.fwdconcepts.com), the DSP chip market grew 27.2% during 2004. The wireless market accounts for almost three-quarters of that growth at 71.5% (up from 68% in 2003). It’s noteworthy that most of the gains occurred in the first half of last year, because the (mostly) Chinese cellphone makers had to deal with a glut of inventory. Forward Concepts has lowered its forecast for the 2005 DSP-market growth from 20 to 10%.
As signal-processing designs become more complex, device and IP (intellectual-property) vendors are developing and packaging bundled resources, platforms, or reference designs to demonstrate to designers how to use their products for specific applications. DSP vendors are committing serious design resources to developing reference designs, which continue to gain importance as tools to secure strategic design-in
wins. These reference designs often go beyond samples and application notes—in some cases, to the point of turnkey implementations. Currently, finding a vendor’s available reference designs is neither straightforward nor consistent within a company’s product material. EDN Asia plans to highlight reference-design information in this directory, and this year in its 2005 Microprocessor Directory, as well as in annual updates.
EDN Asia has loosened the criteria for inclusion in the DSP directory to better accommodate the many ways to implement signal processing, including hybrid combinations of softwareprogrammable DSPs, fixed-function devices, reconfigurable devices, and host microprocessors. Standard processor devices with multiple DSP and RISC cores and the development tools that support these devices continue to become more common. The current online table categorizes DSP offerings not by application space but rather by vendor. If you have ideas about column headings that would be more useful to your search for the perfect DSP product, please drop us a line. Likewise, if you have ideas for how to incorporate other types of signal-processing options, such as fixed-function blocks, reference designs, and platforms, please e-mail your ideas to us at ednaeditorial@rbi-asia.com.
