New DaVinci 36x videao processors from TI with ARM Cortex A8

17th August 2010

ES Admin

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Software and hardware engineers can easily design more media-rich, portable applications utilizing the new DaVinci™ DM37x video processors from Texas Instruments Incorporated. The DM3730 and DM3725 with their ARM® Cortex™-A8 and C64x+™ DSP core, imaging and video accelerator (IVA), 3D graphics processor (DM3730 only) and high-performance peripherals (USB 2.0, SD/MMC) integrated on a single system-on-chip (SoC), are suitable for applications requiring HD video processing or a large amount of data processing. These applications include navigation systems, media players, medical patient monitoring devices, industrial test and measurement devices, industrial vision and portable communications.

DM37x processors are software compatible with the OMAP35x generation of processors and pin-to-pin compatible with Sitara™ AM37x devices allowing for an easy product migration strategy to higher performing options. The differentiation between the DM3730 and DM3725 is that the DM3725 does not have a 3D graphics accelerator. Customers moving to the DM3730 from the OMAP3530 can look forward to a 50 percent increase in ARM performance, a 40 percent increase in DSP performance, double the graphics performance and uses approximately 40 percent less power.

The 800MHz C64x+™ DSP and hardware video accelerator enable audio and HD 720p video decoding and encoding (audio and video codecs included) independent of the ARM processor. This allows additional expansion on the ARM processor to run more high-level applications and a rich, responsive 2D or 3D graphical user interface, for applications such as an industrial personal digital assistant (PDA).

The DSP engine is programmable, allowing multiple general signal processing tasks such as digital filtering, math functions and image processing and analysis. For example, in a camera-enabled industrial application, the DSP can run an edge-detection algorithm on the video coming from a camera to detect the presence or absence of people or objects.
Minimizing development costs and accelerating time to market, TI offers a complete software development kit (SDK) containing everything developers need to evaluate the device and begin development on the DM3730 evaluation module (EVM) in minutes.