Lexra Announces Low-Power RISC-DSP Core Offering Better Performance at Lower Power than an ARM9E.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 2, 2000

Lexra's New LX5180 RISC-DSP Processor Performs Tasks Three Times Faster Than an ARM9E Yet Consumes Less Than Half Its Power At the Same

Clock Speeds

ASIC Designers building portable, feature-rich, battery-powered embedded systems are disarmed by their lack of choice in low-power processor cores.

Lexra, a leading developer of processor cores for embedded applications, adds another viable choice by introducing the new LX5180 RISC-DSP core. For applications such as MP3 and AC3, Web-enabled digital cameras, Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and PDAs, the LX5180 can operate on as little as 40 percent of the power an ARM9E demands for the same application.

"With the LX5180, we have broken ARM's claim as the low-power CPU IP core supplier," says Charlie Cheng, president and CEO of Lexra Inc. "It will enable us to compete in high-volume portable consumer applications where up to now, the MIPS ISA has seen limited success."

In addition, next generation applications like 3G cellular will demand more performance. Here, the LX5180 has a clear advantage over the ARM9E. A LX5180 used only 20 MIPS of its total 150 MIPS performance to perform the G.723.1 full duplex VoIP codec algorithm. The ARM consumes 72 MIPS to do the same task. Only the LX5180 would have the headroom to do Web surfing and other features.

Catering to a new class of power-sensitive applications

New embedded systems demanding increased performance with frugal power consumption is best illustrated by the next generation Web-enabled cellular phones. According to Micrologic Research, a market research firm based in Phoenix, the 2 million wireless Internet subscribers in 1999 will grow to 5 million this year and 93 million by the year 2004. Another wireless application Micrologic expects to demand compute performance and low power is Bluetooth, an unlicensed frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum communications protocol in the 2.4-GHz band for wireless local networking. The research firm predicts 5-million units to ship in 2001 and a whopping 1.1 billion units in 2005.

To serve these newly emerging computing requirements, the industry is saddled with the ARM computing architecture developed in the early 1990s. Its power-savings techniques were targeted for a 2.5-micron process technology. Since then, the architecture has only scaled the power savings linearly as process technology has evolved. Lexra recognized the implications of advancing process technology when it developed its new LX5180 and the result is a IP core that is well suited to the demands of 0.18 and smaller process geometries.

"The LX5180 was designed specifically for applications performing signal processing and integer computation," says Sam Rosen, principle DSP architect at Lexra. "With both RISC and DSP computing capability tightly integrated in the core the LX5180 can perform image processing and control functions far more efficiently than separate RISC and DSP cores integrated on the same silicon. Furthermore, the combined RISC-DSP LX5180 provides a footprint of a mere 1.8 mm squared, compared to the competitive ARM9E with only limited DSP capability which takes up 1.5 mm squared."

The soul of a new machine

The LX5180 shares many of the features offered by the LX5280 RISC-DSP. It incorporates the Radiax DSP instruction extension to the baseline MIPS I instructions (except for un-aligned loads and stores, which are emulated in software). The LX5180 also has a dual Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) arrangement to achieve a maximum of 360 million MACs per second at 180 MHz. The Radiax instructions, combined with the high performance MACs support all DSP constructs such as fractional arithmetic, rounding, saturation, and overflow protection, making application software easy to port.

At the heart of the LX5180 is a new, low power CPU engine which takes advantages of several power design optimizations. First, the LX5180 takes advantage of its synthesizable nature by optimizing the CPU database for each specific process technology, as well as the target operating frequency. Lexra's experiments have shown that the power dissipation of the LX5180 varies between 0.3 mW/MHz at below 50 MHz all the way to 0.5 mW/MHz at 180 MHz. For large structured areas such as register file, the LX5180 minimizes the power consumption with custom designed techniques not available from synthesis tools. The register file, which is the largest block of the CPU uses clock gating to shut-off power when not used. Furthermore, much of the logic within the CPU has been further enhanced to not recompute every cycle when inputs stay the same. Lastly, for Lexra's SmoothCore licensees, the clock buffers and the power supply have been optimized to conserve power dissipation.

An algorithm common in image processing applications, a simple 64-sample dot-product, best illustrates this performance and power savings advantage of the LX5180. The LX5180 running at 180 MHz performs the function in 600 ns. The ARM9E core takes three times as long, 1800 ns. To compute this function, the LX5180 consumes only 48 mW of power; the ARM9E core uses more than twice as much power, at greater than 100 mW.

In terms of development tools, Lexra provides a complete suite of development tools from GreenHill Systems, Embedded Performance, Inc. and Calast. These include C compiler, assembler, debugger, In-Circuit Emulator (ICE), and a cycle accurate simulator.

Pricing and Availability:

Customer shipments of the LX5180 will begin in 3Q 2000, with full production in 4Q 2000. The RTL version of the LX5180 is priced at $425,000 for one project.

About Lexra:

Lexra, Inc. is a leading microprocessor developer specializing in RISC and DSP cores for the embedded market. In addition to competitive performance, small die size and low power consumption, Lexra's processor cores are also easy to use, easy to port and provide customers with cost effective solutions. Lexra is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. Further information can be found at http://www.lexra.com.

Note to Editors: MIPS, MIPS I, MIPS16, R3000, and other MIPS common law marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of MIPS Technologies, Inc. Lexra, Inc. is not associated with MIPS Technologies, Inc. in any way. Unaligned loads & stores are not supported in hardware.