Cell Phone DSP Hardware

Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did 
the TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one 
of the several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices requiring 
a lot of porting?

-- 

Rick

In article <mlaiba$8jp$1@dont-email.me>, rickman  <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

>Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did 
>the TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one 
>of the several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices requiring 
>a lot of porting?

Not sure.  I believe both TI and Broadcom have de-prioritized
or exited that business, leaving Qualcomm and Mediatek (and, upstarts).
TI will of course still do an SoC for you with their DSP cores
and ARM cores.

Qualcomm has its own in-house home grown DSP in their Snapdragon
series.  Not sure if it was something they obtained from a 
startup they swallowed up.

I do not know what Mediatek uses.


Steve

On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 19:49:11 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

>Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did 
>the TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one 
>of the several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices requiring 
>a lot of porting?

As has been discussed here many times before, this sort of information
is often difficult to come by.   Some of the more interested magazines
sometimes do tear-downs to see what's in various models, and even then
some chips may not give up much more info than who made them (and
sometimes not even that).  So figuring out what's going on at a
detailed level of the implementation is often not public and often
deliberately so.

I've no idea, personally, and it's often a moving target, too.   e.g.,
Samsung recently ditched Qualcomm and is now using their own chips.
So there was a significant change there, and it is transparent to
users and almost everybody but the suppliers themselves.


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
http://www.anchorhill.com

rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> writes:

> Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did
> the TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one
> of the several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices
> requiring a lot of porting?

Rick,

Not THESE days, but when I was at Ericsson (late 90s/early 2000s), they
had their own GSM chipset (all hardware) for many years that did pretty
all the DSP in the tx/rx chain except the voice codecs, which, along
with other audio processing, was done on a TI C54x DSP.
-- 
Randy Yates
Digital Signal Labs
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com

Randy Yates <yates@digitalsignallabs.com> writes:

> rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did
>> the TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one
>> of the several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices
>> requiring a lot of porting?
>
> Rick,
>
> Not THESE days, but when I was at Ericsson (late 90s/early 2000s), they
> had their own GSM chipset (all hardware) for many years that did pretty
> all the DSP in the tx/rx chain except the voice codecs, which, along
> with other audio processing, was done on a TI C54x DSP.

PS: When Ericsson split off their handset development to Sony/Ericsson
around 2001, they formed Ericsson Mobile Platforms to do chipset
development. They were around for several years, but I'm not sure if
they still are.

Also, I don't know if either of these answer your inquiry - I may have
not understood it correctly.
-- 
Randy Yates
Digital Signal Labs
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com

On 06/11/2015 11:56 AM, Randy Yates wrote:
> PS: When Ericsson split off their handset development to Sony/Ericsson
> around 2001, they formed Ericsson Mobile Platforms to do chipset
> development. They were around for several years, but I'm not sure if
> they still are.
>
> Also, I don't know if either of these answer your inquiry - I may have
> not understood it correctly.
>
Ericsson's handset chipset business joined up with ST's, and then the 
whole thing closed down.

Steve

On 6/11/2015 12:25 AM, Steve Underwood wrote:
> On 06/11/2015 11:56 AM, Randy Yates wrote:
>> PS: When Ericsson split off their handset development to Sony/Ericsson
>> around 2001, they formed Ericsson Mobile Platforms to do chipset
>> development. They were around for several years, but I'm not sure if
>> they still are.
>>
>> Also, I don't know if either of these answer your inquiry - I may have
>> not understood it correctly.
>>
> Ericsson's handset chipset business joined up with ST's, and then the
> whole thing closed down.

I seem to remember that.  And that many stock analysts said it was not a 
good idea.

-- 

Rick

On 6/10/2015 11:56 PM, Randy Yates wrote:
> Randy Yates <yates@digitalsignallabs.com> writes:
>
>> rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did
>>> the TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one
>>> of the several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices
>>> requiring a lot of porting?
>>
>> Rick,
>>
>> Not THESE days, but when I was at Ericsson (late 90s/early 2000s), they
>> had their own GSM chipset (all hardware) for many years that did pretty
>> all the DSP in the tx/rx chain except the voice codecs, which, along
>> with other audio processing, was done on a TI C54x DSP.
>
> PS: When Ericsson split off their handset development to Sony/Ericsson
> around 2001, they formed Ericsson Mobile Platforms to do chipset
> development. They were around for several years, but I'm not sure if
> they still are.
>
> Also, I don't know if either of these answer your inquiry - I may have
> not understood it correctly.

Sure, an insight is helpful.  I was just curious how the DSP thing 
worked out.  I remember when cell phones were starting out TI made a 
decision to steer the whole semi part of the company (which may have 
ended up being pretty much the *whole* company) to support the cell 
phone business.  At one time I think every hand set had a TI 5xxx DSP in 
it and every base station had a TI 6xxx DSP (or many I guess).  Likely 
even the base stations have special chips in them now.

-- 

Rick

rickman  <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

>Sure, an insight is helpful.  I was just curious how the DSP thing 
>worked out.  I remember when cell phones were starting out TI made a 
>decision to steer the whole semi part of the company (which may have 
>ended up being pretty much the *whole* company) to support the cell 
>phone business.  

Yep.

>At one time I think every hand set had a TI 5xxx DSP in 
>it and every base station had a TI 6xxx DSP (or many I guess).  Likely 
>even the base stations have special chips in them now.

When I started working for TI in 2000, the narrative was that
they were selling "a million chips a day" into the handset market,
and that most phones had one or more TI chips in them.  Although,
these were not necessarily baseband chips, some could have been
RF, little battery chargers, audio, whatever.

When I left five years later, all had changed.  TI are experts
at exiting businesses well before a profit center turns into a loss
center.  And they are very careful about not overbuilding
fab capacity... these guys simply do not do red ink.

But I would not much doubt there are still plenty of TI DSP cores
in TI-produced SoC's around.  

Steve

"rickman"  wrote in message news:mlaiba$8jp$1@dont-email.me...
>Anyone know what DSP hardware is used in cell phones these days?  Did the 
>TI designs end up as IP on SoCs allowing software reuse or did one of the 
>several DSP startups get their IP onto the SoC devices requiring a lot of 
>porting?

Hi Rick,
As far as I know the vast majority of baseband cell phone chips are based on 
DSP IP cores from companies like CEVA, TENSILICA. VERISILICON and similar. 
These DSP cores are of course integrated in custom ASICs. According to 
CEVA's web site, they are sold more than 5 billion DSP cores to date, more 
than 1 billion per year.

Rober Lacoste
www.alciom.com