What needs can be seen in the renewed popularity of high-priced DSPs?

From the real-time market data, we see that there are several DSP materials with eye-catching heat growth recently, among which there are long-standing high-priced materials as well as those whose heat has recently shot up. Since the post-holiday market, although the overall recovery of the heat, but the demand is not too much better, can we find some demand direction from these DSP, let's look down.

The ADSP-21060LCW-160 is ADI's SHARC family of processors, supporting IEEE-compatible 32-bit floating-point, 40-bit floating-point, and 32-bit fixed-point mathematical operations with a peak floating-point performance of 120 MFLOP, making it the 32-bit processor in the SHARC family optimized for high-performance digital signal processing applications.The ADSP-2106x, based on the The ADSP-2106x, based on the ADSP-21000 processor core, is a complete system-on-chip, highlighted by the addition of 4Mb of on-chip dual-port SRAM and integrated I/O peripherals supported by a dedicated I/O bus.

ADSP-21060LCW-160 in fact has long been a very hot material, it has a high degree of heat in the first half of last year, the price of a long period of time in the ten thousand dollars or more. After the holidays, the material's search volume rebounded rapidly, reaching more than 1,000 times a week, although less than the peak of the previous heat, but the rapid recovery is worth noting. The material's domestic inventory index is very low for a long time, on behalf of its market circulation is very small, over ten thousand price is understandable. In addition, the material was included in the original factory "not recommended for new designs", into the end of the life cycle, but also for its high price.

DSPB56367AG150 can be traced back to the era of Freescale, is a 24-bit DSP, the target application is audio processing, and its computing power reaches 150 MIPS, which is currently classified by NXP as not recommended for new designs. Earlier the material heat in the third quarter of last year the highest, the current round of heat is in the holiday season began to emerge in early March to reach the peak, the price is in the vicinity of 145 yuan higher level.

DSPIC30F2010-30I/SP is defined by Microchip as a "high-performance 16-bit DSC", DSC compared to DSP, the difference between the processor (Processor) and the controller (Controller) difference. As the original factory definition of the DSC, the material can achieve 30MIPS arithmetic than the general DSP is much lower, and the built-in storage capacity is also lower. Compared to DSPs that favor digital signal processing, DSCs favor control aspects, such as motor drives, and thus require less arithmetic power.

The DSPIC30F2010-30I/SP has seen a rapid rise in searches in the month following the holiday, recently reaching more than 2,000 searches in a single week, compared to the previous monthly peak of just over 1,000. Its domestic inventory data is also high in tandem with the search volume, representing strong demand at the moment.

These three hot DSPs from ADI, Microchip and NXP are representative, and two of them are "not recommended for new designs". The end-of-life cycle is about to be completed, provoking the demand for stocking. But in addition to these, there are some recent hot DSP, there are some search volume is very low model, the recent heat have risen, and from the Chuangxin index of the latest "daily composite index" point of view, there are a lot of DSP there is a short period of time the phenomenon of heat surge and then return to silence, it seems that there is some temporary demand.

So where is the demand for DSPs today? A possible way is AI-related applications, such as the production of AI algorithms, the need for a large number of corpus or image data input, for the initial processing of this information, it is necessary to introduce DSP. High-performance DSPs are capable of floating-point operations and can be well-matched with GPUs, NPUs, ASICs, etc., which are the main chips, to assist in maximizing the performance of the system. The name DSP also implies that it is best at digital signal processing tasks, which distinguishes it from MCUs and SoCs that are also main chips.

DSP, MCU and SoC Differences

When it comes to DSP, it is natural to think of MCU and SoC, which are also processor chips. The most common MCU in the general category of use, which means micro-control unit, in its internal package of processing units, memory and a variety of analog peripheral interfaces, itself can function as a complete computer, and is therefore also known as the "microcontroller" MCU because of the integrity of its computer structure, is often used in the control of applications such as small appliances, robot arms, and windshield wipers. MCUs are required for the operation of small appliances, robot arms, and automobile peripheral parts such as windshield wipers.

Representative MCU products include Atmel's AVR series, Microchip's PIC series, TI's MSP430 series, ST's STM8 series, etc. ARM, as an emerging architecture, is the most representative product is the STM32 series, as well as NXP's LPC series.

DSP refers to digital signal processor, emphasizing computing power, fixed-point and floating-point computing performance is stronger than MCU, mainly for the processing of digital signals, such as image signals and audio signals, etc. DSP can be analogous to the CPU, are professional processing chip, and therefore rely on the peripheral construction to achieve the best performance. In contrast, MCU comes with a complete set of peripherals, can be independently realized control functions, of course, if you need better performance can also build their own peripherals. The current rise of AI applications, high-performance DSPs can often take advantage of its powerful floating-point computing performance, to take on the processing of images and corpus material. The most important DSP original manufacturers are TI and ADI.

There is also a class of DSC chips, compared to the DSP usually lower arithmetic, and peripherals comprehensive, more in favor of its control attributes, or specifically defined as a lower performance of the DSP. for example, TI's C2000 series is now the original definition of the DSC, rather than the DSP, the representative model is a long time the heat is also very high, such as the TMS320F2833x.

SoC refers to the integrated system on a chip, the same monolithic properties, but the current use of SoC to call the chip, generally refers to high-performance core chips, such as Apple A series, Qualcomm Snapdragon and other cell phone chips, which are commonly used in the manufacture of advanced wafer process. With the increasing introduction of more advanced processes for various types of core chips, the boundaries between categories such as SoC and MCU are blurring.