Cradle Delivers Industry's Highest Single-Chip DSP Performance; Programmable DSP Family with up to Sixteen 375MHz DSP Engines Boosts Compute Power for Multimedia Applications.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Cradle Technologies, Inc., a pioneer in high-performance multiprocessor DSP platform solutions for real-time multimedia, today announced three products in its new CT3600 product family, realizing a Multiprocessor DSP vision that delivers the industry's highest single-chip DSP performance and most scalable price/performance DSP platform for embedded multimedia applications. Cradle is the only supplier of Multiprocessor DSP solutions consisting of multiple DSP cores, multiple general-purpose processors (GPP) and a programmable I/O subsystem.

Highest Single-Chip DSP Performance

The first member of the family, the CT3616, can encode 16 real-time MPEG-4 channels (480fps) at SIF resolution, sixteen G.711 voice channels, perform a complete IP packet encapsulation (RTP/UDP) with a 10/100 Ethernet MAC and provide an integrated hard disk (IDE) or compact FLASH storage interface, achieving the world's first 16-channel "digital video recorder (DVR) on-a-chip" for the surveillance industry. The CT3616 is the industry's best price/performance encoding solution at $5.50 per channel (MPEG4 SP L3), more than 2X better than the closest competition. The CT3616 device also enables the industry's first programmable DSP-based single-chip real-time D1 H.264 main profile video encoder for next-generation IP TV head-ends, surveillance DVRs and media gateways. The CT3616 offers 24000 MMACs (Million Multiply-Accumulates) or 275MMACs per dollar. This is 4X better than other programmable multimedia DSPs in the market today.

Most Flexible, Integrated and Scalable DSP Platform

"The CT3600 family uniquely integrates multiple general-purpose processors (GPP) alongside multiple DSPs, thereby improving processor efficiency of control, data flow and networking stack functions required in today's multimedia applications," said Kourosh Amiri, director of product marketing for Cradle. "Integration of multiple video and audio codecs, all of the control & network stack processing and a unique programmable I/O subsystem into a single multimedia DSP reduces board space up to 75% and system cost up to 50%."

The CT3600 product family integrates up to sixteen loosely coupled SIMD 32-bit DSP engines, eight general-purpose CPUs, 144 programmable I/O pins and a three-tiered memory hierarchy system to accelerate and integrate multimedia infrastructure processing. Three products in the CT3600 family provide a range of price/performance options.

Family Member      CT3608     CT3612     CT3616

DSP Cores          Eight      Twelve     Sixteen
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GPP Cores          Four       Six        Eight
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Programmable I/O   128        144        144
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Data Memory        256KB      256KB      256KB
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Speed Grades       230, 300,  230, 300,  230, 300,
                   375 MHz    375 MHz    375 MHz
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Availability -     Q305       Q305       June 05
Samples
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The uniquely programmable I/O subsystem delivers up to 144 intelligent I/O pins for fast and flexible interconnect. This eliminates external interface chips such as FPGAs typically found in single-purpose DSPs with slow general-purpose I/Os further reducing board space and system cost.

Complete Tool Set Slashes Development Time

In conjunction with the release of the CT3600 product family, Cradle is announcing the availability of a complete CT3600 development environment. This includes Version 5.0 of Cradle's Software Development Kit (SDK) and the RDS3600 Digital Media Development Platform. The CT3600 MDSP slashes development time when compared to prior multi-core DSP chips or other hardware-based parallel architectures through its innovative multi-processor architecture coupled with two key technologies: a multi-core debugger and an intermediate-level compiler for DSP task optimization.

--INSPECTOR(TM), the industry's first multi-core development and graphical debugging environment, provides unique debugging, profiling and performance monitoring functions for up to 24 processors simultaneously while achieving complete source code and single stepping/breakpoint control of each processor. Embedded hardware in the chip acts in concert with INSPECTOR to provide complete visibility into global/local variables, registers, and data memory and activity of all processors.

--Today's Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) parallel DSP chips require time-consuming assembly code optimization to achieve high performance. Cradle's CLASM(TM) -- a C-based intermediate-level compiler for timing-critical DSP task optimization -- delivers predictable design performance while reducing tedious low-level assembly optimization typically required when using VLIW C-compilers.

"The SDK V5.0 tool set shatters the myth that multiprocessor architectures are difficult to program," said Roger Li, Director of Engineering at Jaxstream, a Cradle 3rd Party Alliance Partner. "We have had early access to the toolset to implement our popular MPEG4 codec on the CT3616. After being initially skeptical, we have been amazed with both our design productivity and the CT3616 performance scalability."

Markets and Applications

The CT3600 family dramatically expands the market opportunities of the initial CT3400 Multiprocessor DSP family from Cradle. It delivers new price/performance points for the rapidly expanding video surveillance market including applications such as IP cameras and streamers, network video recorders (NVRs) and multi-channel DVRs. The CT3600 family addresses the performance and integration requirements of the high-performance imaging market including multi-function printer and scanner products, film processing equipment and machine-vision systems. It also is ideal for the emerging multi-codec and multi-function requirements of the broadcast & IP TV head-end market including encoding, streaming and transcoding equipment, media gateways, video conferencing systems and video phones.

Pricing and Availability

Version 5.0 of the Software Development Kit and the RDS3600 Digital Media Development Board will be available in June 2005, enabling design starts for all three members of the CT3600 family. The CT3616 device will be sampling in June 2005 and is priced as low as $72 in 10K quantities for the slowest speed grade. The other two CT3600 members will be sampling in Q305 and are priced as low as $40 in 10K quantities.

About Cradle Technologies

Cradle is a fabless semiconductor company providing the highest performance, most flexible multiprocessor DSP solutions for real-time video, audio and imaging applications. Cradle's multiprocessor DSP architecture innovation delivers high-performance scalable DSP processing with the flexibility, time-to-market and product differentiation benefits of processor-based programmable platforms. Coupled with a Rapid Development System and suite of IP software functions, Cradle provides OEMs with all the building blocks necessary to enable flexible yet high-performance DSP designs. Cradle's corporate headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, California. For more information about the company call 408-636-5000 or visit www.cradle.com.