M Harish

TI’s latest offering is not a made-in-India chip. Reflecting the rise of India as a design-outsourcing base, the company is marketing the designed-in-the-USA C55x series of DSP chips to designers and companies in India. The new family is being sold on the basis of price-performance. “Product design groups would otherwise have to use a chip 3x costlier,” says M Harish, TI India’s business development manager.

The C55x family of DSPs is targeted at R&D shops, design houses and the defence establishment. It can be used in portable applications such as phones, medical equipment and MP3 players. The package size is smaller and power consumption lower at 200 milliwatts offering .05 milliwatt/MIPS. In a product such as a high-end VoIP phone, this chip can account for 20-30 percent of the components. Existing modems consume 100s of milliwatts. Soft modems based on the C55x would consume far less power.

With DSPs priced at $15, designers were tempted to go easy on features. With the new chip, they can create full-fledged products. 1,000 companies in India use TI’s DSPs; 15-20 of them are likely customers. “If we can get 25 new accounts to use this DSP for making products and 25,000 to 1,00,000 extra units ship, it will be a great success,” says Harish.

The chip can be used in applications as diverse as a home theatre system or a hearing aid. People exposed to TI’s older C5000 series will find that many of the tools of that platform will work here as well. Code from the earlier C5000 series of chips can be migrated without changes, as the source code is compatible.

TI licenses standard algorithms with the chip; there are several hundred such pieces of logic. Some are royalty based while others are free.