3DSP Announces the Availability of an Advanced DSP System Bus Controller Simplifying SOC Applications.

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 20, 2000

DSP-Shuttle(TM) is a High-Speed, Fully Synthesizable and

Re-Configurable On-Chip System Bus Controller

3DSP Corporation(TM), the leading developer of DSP intellectual property (IP) core technology, today announced the release of its DSP-Shuttle(TM).

This advanced DSP bus controller is designed to meet real time requirements and greatly improve DSP system performance by minimizing system bus power consumption and providing optimal support to SP-5(TM) and SP-3(TM) DSP based systems. 3DSP's DSP-Shuttle is the first system bus controller designed specifically for DSP SOC applications. The bus controller is also re-configurable, fully synthesizable and currently available via licensing agreement.

According to Cahners In-Stat Group, it is estimated that by 2003 there will be a demand for almost 210 million SOC units for small consumer appliances with revenue approaching $4 billion. The research group predicts that a majority of SOCs will be implemented in standard cell technology for applications whose volume will justify the engineering effort and investment risk. 3DSP's DSP-Shuttle will fulfill the marketplace needs of DSP SOC application manufacturers.

"One of the most difficult design challenges is building an interface between a variety of differing peripherals, slower memories and high performance DSP cores," said Robert Heaton, chairman and CEO of Obsidian Technology. "The requirements of a bus controller for a DSP system are quite different from those of a micro-controller system. This challenge is particularly great when one tries to allow full bandwidth for the fastest peripherals, meet real time requirements of the system, and minimize power consumption when full bandwidth is not required. 3DSP's DSP-Shuttle addressees these challenges quite impressively."

"In designing the DSP-Shuttle we wanted to make it easy for our DSP processor core intellectual property customers to integrate peripherals designed by them, third parties or us into their system on chip," said Kan Lu, president and chief executive officer of 3DSP Corporation.

"We focused on meeting DSP specific application demands, reducing bus power consumption, increasing versatility and maximizing ease of integration. The DSP-Shuttle significantly increases the system performance for SP-5 based DSP systems and makes SOC integration a virtual plug-n-play process."

The DSP-Shuttle can be configured to support multiple bus masters and an array of synchronous and asynchronous peripherals, as well as special purpose processors. When synthesized to a 0.25u process, the DSP-Shuttle can move data between the DSP and peripherals at a maximum rate of 600 million bytes per second (over 800 million bytes per second in a 0.18u process).

Transfer Modes

3DSP's new bus controller can support up to 15 simultaneous data transfers with zero overhead arbitration and has a single data bus and an address bus shared among peripherals. All peripherals, controllers and DSPs are slaves to this advanced bus controller. The DSP-Shuttle supports multi-priority levels to meet real time requirements for different data types. Data can be transferred between peripherals or within a single peripheral. The following four transfer modes are supported:

       --   Normal transfer -- Transfers data with a burst size of 1, 2,
          4, 8 or more 32 bit words,

       --   Chained Transfer -- Allows any arbitrary number of transfer
          size,

       --   Infinite Transfer -- Supports transfers of infinite size,
          and

       --   Invalidate Transfer -- A non-deterministic data size can be
          transferred between slaves.

The DSP-Shuttle supports 2-D data transfers by allowing matrix data transfers to the DSP for processing. Also, the DSP-Shuttle has a simple, uniform interface to all peripherals regardless of clock frequency. It is available now for license as a VHDL or Verilog soft core and can be used in a wide variety of DSP applications. However, it is designed to be most advantageous for use with 3DSP's SP-5 or SP-3 DSP cores.

About 3DSP Corporation

3DSP Corporation, a leader in the embedded digital signal processing IP industry, was founded in 1997 by a group of key executives from leading semiconductor and computer companies such as Texas Instruments, Crystal Semiconductor Corp., Sony, Rockwell and Sharp Electronics. The company licenses high-performance, low-power digital signal processing IP solutions to system-on-chip (SOC) companies for next generation Internet, broadband, wireless communications and multimedia appliances.

3DSP provides a complete IP solution. For more information on the company visit www.3dsp.com or contact 3DSP at 16735 Von Karman, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92614, phone [phone]; fax [phone].

Robert Heaton is the chairman and CEO of Obsidian Technology, which is a consulting company founded in 1996 and focuses primarily on high-speed DSP solutions for communication systems. For more information visit www.ot1.com or phone [phone].

Note to Editors: 3DSP Corporation, SP-5, SP-3 and DSP-Shuttle are trademarks of 3DSP Corporation.