Texas Memory Systems delivers high-performance DSP hardware and high-performance DSP software. In classical computer marketing all computer manufacturer’s touted the speed of their hardware. Now as hardware gets incredibly fast the marketing emphasis is put on achieving this speed in real world applications. This usable performance is directly related to the hardware-software interface efficiency.
The TMS DSP software suite has been designed to operate as a stand-alone application development environment, or to integrate into the XMIDAS application environment (via VPX). The stand-alone environment offers features that are unsupported by XMIDAS. One such feature is dynamic configurability, allowing application changes without requiring a full restart. This stand-alone environment has been optimized for latency and throughput, allowing the final operator to scrutinize signals-of-interest or run full speed analysis of vast amounts of data.
Based on the popular XP-15, the XP-30 integrates several functions within a single PCI card. The XP-30 includes two complete TM-44 DSP processing nodes, a separate global memory, an I/O daughter card, and the PCI interface. With the XKE-10 I/O daughter card, the XP-30 can input two ECL channels, preprocess this data through a high-density Xilinx FPGA, and store the results in global memory for additional processing with the two TM-44 DSP nodes. Users can now have the best of both worlds. TM-44 nodes will do the standard DSP processing and the Xilinx FPGA can do the special data manipulation functions (tune, filter, decimate). Central to the data flow within the XP-30 is the high-bandwidth (1.5 GB/sec) global memory that provides a high-speed buffer for all devices. The XP-30 eliminates most PCI data transfers usually associated with XP-15 operations. Now, only the final result needs to be transferred on the PCI-bus to the host computer's memory.
The XP-30 is based on two TM-44 DSP nodes for most of its number crunching power. The TM-44 is a chip developed by Texas Memory Systems, Inc. to do intense DSP algorithms easily. The TM-44 chip is comprised of 80 floating-point processing units running at 100 MHz, a high bandwidth external memory bus (8.0 GB/sec), four special elementary function units (trigonometric functions, square root, divide), and on-chip program memory. The TM-44 executes a very long instruction word (VLIW) program; processing multiple data values each clock cycle. Each TM-44 DSP node has 8 GFLOPS of processing power, 8 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, and many additional units necessary to maintain processing efficiency.
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