Target supplies IP Designer tool-suite to Dialog

While Dialog is a long-time user of Target’s IP Designer tool-suite, it was the first time for the company to apply the tool-suite in the graphics domain. The total number of ASIPs designed with IP Designer in Dialog’s SC14453 SoC is three: next to the graphics core it also contains two instances of Dialog’s Gen3DSP ASIP. Gen3DSP is an ultra-low power signal processor for audio and communication functions, also designed with IP Designer. “Dialog’s new design underscores IP Designer’s suitability for creating and programming ASIPs for graphics processing,” says Werner Geurts, VP Applications at Target. “Key architectural features of this OpenVG graphics core include the use of application-specific floating-point operators of different word- lengths, a deep instruction pipeline with register bypasses to avoid dependency hazards, and the combined use of instruction-level parallelism and single-instruction multiple-data processing. IP Designer supports these features well, both in its C compiler and its RTL hardware generation technology,” Geurts continues. René Kohlmann, Senior Director for Dialog’s Low Energy Wireless and VoIP Business Development, comments: “The addition of 2D graphics support to our new Green VoIP chip will enable our customers to add intuitive color touch-screens to their VoIP products. Ultra-low power and small area requirements dictated the design of an application-specific graphics processor. Using IP Designer’s automated generation capability of optimized hardware and C compiler, we were able to develop an OpenVG implementation in silicon right on schedule.” “We are delighted with Dialog’s continued commitment to ASIP designs, based on our IP Designer tool- suite,” says Gert Goossens, Target’s CEO. “Systems-on-chip for consumer and enterprise products are evolving into advanced multi-functional multicore architectures. The combination of high performance, low power, low cost and flexibility naturally results in a need for multiple ASIPs. Dialog’s new Green VoIP chip illustrates this trend well. We are especially happy with this design win in the embedded graphics space, where we expect power and cost requirements will increasingly result in a choice for application- specific architectures,” Goossens adds.