The Equator MAP-CA™ DSP: an end-to-end broadband signal processor™ VLIW

Today´s multimedia services, both at the server/headend and the client/consumer end, require high computational performance to support video encoding, decoding, and transcoding. Traditionally, the processing requirements have been met by application-specific processors (ASIC). What once were standalone single-function devices are now network-connected, multifunction service platforms - the Internet-ready digital television/video recorder/teleconference/game platform, for example. As a result, these platforms now must support multiple image formats, compression standards, and processing algorithms. Equator Technologies has developed a high-performance, programmable system on a chip, the MAP-CA digital signal processor (DSP), to address this requirement. The MAP-CA DSP combines general-purpose reduced instruction set computer processing with high-performance image and signal processing in a very long instruction word framework. The chip is designed to replace hardwired ASIC in a variety of products, including digital head-end, networking products, and consumer applications. We present an analysis of the MAP-CA DSP architecture and provide several performance benchmarks with popular media processing applications.