Texas Instruments DaVinci

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The Texas Instruments DaVinci combines TI's DM642 DSP with an ARM926EJ-S general-purpose CPU and integrated peripherals in a system-on-a-chip optimized for digital video applications.

1 Overview
2 Peripherals
3 Models
4 Operating System Support
5 External links
6 See also

[edit] Overview

A typical multimedia system such as a digital video recorder or digital camera can be split roughly into two pieces: control and media. The control portion handles tasks such as memory card or hard disk access, user interface, and networking, while the media portion covers tasks such as encoding and decoding of audio and video. A general-purpose processor performs well in control tasks, but all but the fastest of these processors are not sufficiently powerful for intensive media-related tasks such as real-time, high-quality video encoding. A DSP, on the other hand, is superb at the repetitive, easily parallelizable media-related tasks, but usually performs poorly in control-related jobs. [1] (PDF)

The idea behind DaVinci is that by using both a general-purpose processor and a DSP, the control and media portions can both be executed by processors that excel at their respective tasks. The integration of these two components into one chip simplifies the system design and allows for more efficient communication between the two components.

[edit] Peripherals

The DaVinci includes a number of on-chip peripherals. These include:

Support for memory cards such as CompactFlash, SD Card and MMC
ATA interface
CCD Controller for digital camera/camcorder applications
Connectivity, including USB 2.0 Host and Client modes, VLYNQ (interface for FPGA, Wireless LAN, PCI), EMAC (Ethernet MAC) with MDIO
GPIO
Enhanced DMA
Interrupt controller
Digital LCD controller
Serial interfaces, including SPI, I²C, and I²S, UART
Histogram, autofocus, autoexposure, and auto-white-balance (H3A) acceleration
Image resize acceleration
A/D and D/A converters for analog video input and output

[edit] Models

DM6443 - ARM9 + Texas Instruments TMS320C6400 DSP + DaVinci Video (Decode) - Video Accelerator and Networking for display
DM6446 - ARM9 + Texas Instruments TMS320C6400 DSP + DaVinci Video (Encode and Decode) - Video Accelerator and Networking for capture and display

[edit] Operating System Support

The DSP in the DaVinci generally runs TI's DSP/BIOS RTOS. DSP/BIOS Link drivers run on both the ARM processor and the DSP to provide communication between the two. A number of operating systems support DaVinci and the DSP/BIOS Link drivers: