Norwood, Mass.—Analog Devices Inc. is getting ready to sample the SHARC ADSP-21469, making it the first family member to debut in the fourth generation of SHARC digital signal processors.

The ADSP-21469 operates at the family's highest performance ever—up to 450 MHz/2700 MFLOPS—with the addition of hardware accelerators as well as application-enabling features that include increased on-chip SRAM, a high-speed DDR2 SDRAM external memory interface, and link ports.

Optimized for pro audio applications such as studio recording equipment, high-end effects processors, commercial audio, and modeling applications, the SHARC ADSP-21469 more than doubles the 32-bit floating-point family's performance compared with earlier SHARC processors. A key factor is the addition of hardware accelerators for widely used signal processing operations: FIR (Finite Impulse Response), IIR (Infinite Impulse Response), and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform).

A further performance uplift and plenty of headroom are provided by additional features that include up to 5Mbits of on-chip SRAM, which represents a 60 percent increase over previous SHARC processors and enables even faster, more efficient execution of effects processing.

A reduction in instruction opcode size frees up as much as 30 percent of the on-chip memory for application code storage. For balanced system performance, the SHARC ADSP-21469 is one of the first floating point processors to include a high-speed DDR2 SDRAM external memory interface.

To support the computation- and data-intensive processing demands of higher sample rates and advanced audio formats, the ADSP-21469 also offers link ports that enable data transfers between two SHARC processors, and provide a parallel command interface for faster data movement than is enabled by the processors' serial peripheral interface (SPI).

These application-oriented processors are code-compatible with prior generation SHARC processors and make use of familiar development tools such as ADI's CROSSCORE software and hardware tools that include the VisualDSP++ integrated development and debug environment (IDDE).

Pricing: Per-unit pricing is $31.50 in quantities of 1,000.
Availability: Samples in first quarter of 2009.
Datasheet: Click here.

Analog Devices, www.analog.com