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HOUSTON - Nearly 14 months atter it formally introduced the TMS32OC6X, Texas Instruments
Inc. is still grinding through a major transition to that radically new digital signal-processor architecture. Indeed, TI's shift to its flagship C6Xand the manufacturing and design issues the transition has raised-is as dramatic, though less closely watched, an event as Intel Corp.'s move to its Merced processor. Supporters of the C6X have acknowledged the DSP is power-hungry and difficult to exploit fully.
The architecture's critics-many of them cusand bugs in what has been hard-tomers of Tl's C54X DbFs-have pointed to come-by silicon, for inefficiencies and bugs in what has been hard-tly released in the me-by silicon, of Mar which Revision 2.1 was quietly released in the middle of March.
Analysts and users alike expect TI will ultimately solve those problems, though the company is not yet out of the woods. "There's no doubt that TI will ship that part," said analyst Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.). "We won't know what the AQLs [acceptable quality levels] will be, but there'll be work-arounds."
The C 6X is the first digital signal processor to offer massively parallel computational resources controlled by averylong instruction word (VLIW). It is the first DSP that allows programming-even for complicated math functions-in C, rather than assembly language, thus ensuring program transportability and maintenance.
"This is the first time anybody's got the brains or the courage to do a DSP with a future. It's not a linear change; it's a step-function change," said John Landow, vice president of Dialogic Corp. (Parsippany, N.J.). Landow said his company intends to wield the C6X as a "competitive weapon" in its late1998 product introductions.
But not everyone is tolerant of the risks inherent in the shift to a new architecture. Topping the list of risks associated with the C6X is availability.
"TI's incredible promotional machinery obviously creates a `market pull"' for the DSP among OEMs and end users, said Tom Flanagan, vice president for broadband products at Telogy Networks (Germantown, Md.). As TI has exertedthatpull, availability has become an overriding issue for the C6X.
Telogybuilds voice-over-packet network (asynchronous transfer mode and Internet Protocol) converters and is a major user of C54X components. In principle, the C6X would let Telogy's phone-company customers conserve...