THE MIPS32 24KE CORE FAMILY

摘要

The 24KE core family delivers accelerated DSP performance at a negligible cost. Simulation results show that the 24KEc core significantly improves DSP performance over the 24Kc core. The 24KEc core demonstrates that such meaningful DSP enhancements can be made to a RISC processor core with negligible effects on clock speed and die area. The success in overcoming the design challenges of implementing the 24KEc core further confirms the viability of moving digital-signal processing onto the main processor core. Merging digital-signal processing onto the main processor also offers other benefits. The combined processing on a single processor creates a more efficient system architecture and results in smaller die area and lower power. The common tool chain for general-purpose and DSP code lowers software-development costs and shortens software-development time. All these factors make the 24KE core family ideal for embedded applications requiring a high-performance, low-cost synthesizable microprocessor with accelerated DSP performance. The 24KE core family is already available for licensing to early adopters and will become generally available later this summer. Processor cores from MIPS Technologies Inc. have traditionally been used as the host processor in embedded devices. Now MIPS cores, specifically the 24KE core family, can run digital-signal processing applications efficiently and hence are well suited to meet the convergence of RISC processors and DSPs to yield system-on-chip integration benefits.