Texas Instruments Inc is betting its all on its market-leading signal processors in the long-established TMS320 family and yesterday added a powerful new member of the family that uses parallel techniques to process 1.6 Giga-instructions per second. The TMS320C61 runs at 200MHz and is fabricated in 0.25 micron technology, Texas says, although it uses different terminology than most chipmakers, so that may be what the rest call 0.35 micron. The chip implements a new Very Long Instruction Word architecture called VelociTI, and features of multiple execution units running in parallel to perform multiple instructions during a single clock cycle. Up to eight 32-bit instructions can be executed per cycle, and the part has 512K-bits of program and 512K-bits of data cache for fast algorithm execution. It is intended for use in wireless base stations, pooled and cable modems, remote access servers, Digital Subscriber Loop systems, multimedia systems and wireless Personal Digital Assistants. The company claims unlimited Internet bandwidth and shorter download times. There was no availabilty data, and on price, the company said only that a designer can implement 10 to 15 V.34 modems per chip at a cost of $6 to $9 per channel, compared with some $18 per channel previously.
