What Happens in Vegas...May Be in Your Next Chip

Cadence was at CES last week showing the most recent additions to their vision, audio, and USB IP solutions. Sometimes these types of shows seem a little bit like the nursery rhyme:

This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt,
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the IP that went in the chip that went on the PCB that went in the VR goggles that lay in the Convention Center that Las Vegas built.

The first product being shown was HiFi audio built using the Tensilica audio DSPs. These support over 150 audio, voice, speech recognition and audio-enhancement software packages. The Tensilica HiFi DSP is the market leader. At CES, it was being shown in a production Dell XPS12 laptop running Waves Maxxaudio and on a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 with Dolby Audio Premium.

Next, still in the audio world, was Audio Weaver. This is a complete PC-based audio system design and implementation solution for the Tensilica HiFi DSP for Audio. This environment allows you to graphically program the HiFi DSP and tune applications in real time. You can design your signal flow, listen to it, and tune it purely on the PC, and then the same design will run on the HiFI DSP unchanged. You can then continue to listen and tune in real time on your board. The combination of the HiFi DSP with Audio Weaver is a proven framework that reduces development risk and significantly improves time to market.

Next we move from audio to video, to the Tensilica Vision P5 DSP, which was being used to show two recognition applications, recognizing street signs and picking pedestrians out from the background, and used a convolutional neural network (CNN) to recognize street signs.

(By the way, if you are interested in neural networks then Cadence is hosting an Embedded Neural Network Summit on February 8 on the Cadence San Jose campus. Get more information.)

Cadence has been working jointly with ARM on an portfolio of IP for Internet of Things (IoT). The demo at CES was around MIPI SoundWire with a low-pincount solution for audio transmission. The whole system was taped out by three engineers in less than three months.

The IoT family of IP includes:

• MIPI SoundWire
• MIPI Display and Camera interface
• MIPI “SenseWire” I3C
• USB Type-C
• Memory IP: LPDDR, SD/eMMC
• Other peripheral IP: I2C, SDIO, SPI, I2S
• AMS IP: PLLs, OSCs, ADC, DAC, AFE

Finally there was a USB Type-C demo. Unlike previous versions of USB, this allows for both power delivery and display to be transmitted over the same cable as the regular USB data, meaning that a display (which is powered) can be connected to a laptop or a smartphone with a single connector that powers the laptop and carries the display and other data. The era where a single connector is all that is needed for everything is arriving. The demo had a Chromebook which could be switched between internal battery power or drawing its power from the IP demonstration board over the USB Type-C cable.

(I previously wrote in more detail about USB Type-C and the Cadence IP solution back in October.)

The next major show that Cadence will be at is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, late in February. I'll be there to cover it.