The ChipWrights processor is specifically designed to handle parallel tasks such as image processing. It uses an enhanced vector architecture to work on several data items simultaneously, while providing high memory bandwidth via an interleaved on-chip memory. This provides the performance of the fastest VLIW processors while maintaining the power and cost characteristics necessary for battery-operated consumer devices.
Many companies offer Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips. The cornerstone of these processors is the ability to do a single multiply-accumulate on one cycle. These devices were generally architected some 10 to 20 years ago and focused on solving problems in radar or audio signal processing.
Visual Signal Processor
ChipWrights is defining a new class of processing chips called ViSPs (visual signal processors). This new type of signal processing architecture is architected from the ground up to excel in two-dimensional processing for still image and video data. ChipWrights uses a SIMD architecture that can achieve very high parallelism when operating on image data. While other vendors add SIMD as an accessory to their older architectures, it is at the core of what the CWvX processors do. The instruction set, address indexing schemes, and data access mechanisms are all tuned for image and video processing. Even the system Direct Memory Access engines are architected to move data in two-dimensional patches.
Fast, Flexible, and In-Control
Fast: The CW5631 SoC has three RISC-like processing engines reading three separate instruction streams with an additional 16 parallel processing elements. The combined RISC engines can process nearly a billion serial instructions per second and the CWv16 engine can perform up to 10,000 16-bit MMACs per second or greater than 80 BOPS.
Flexible: All ChipWrights processors are fully programmable and do not rely on dedicated hardware assist to achieve performance numbers. This
offers the greatest flexibility to end users in modifying their algorithms and their system requirements without redesigning the chip or the hardware.
In-Control: The new CW5631 is the first ChipWrights SoC to include an industry standard ARM processor (ARM926-EJS) as its control processor.
This allows customers to utilize a wealth of off-the-shelf software for operating systems, file systems, protocol stacks, hardware drivers, and so on. With the ChipWrights DSP API in place, customers can develop entire applications on the ARM processor utilizing the performance of the ChipWrights ViSP.
Our family of DSPs:
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Deliver more performance at consumer-level price/performance points than any other programmable chip.
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Offer a viable alternative to ASICs, FPGAs and ASSPs.
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By being virtually 100% software controlled, a single SoC is easily and economically redeployed in new and different markets.
