A MDSP (multimedia DSP) chip for portable multimedia applications

For portable multimedia applications, low power, low cost and multimedia processing capability of DSP chips are essential. However, existing multimedia DSP chips having millions of transistors are not suitable for portable applications and existing fixed-point DSP chips are not suitable for multimedia processing. This paper designs and implements a low cost multimedia fixed-point DSP (MDSP) chip for portable applications. MDSP can process various packed data types-8, 16, 32, 40 bit. In addition, MDSP can perform two vector operations in parallel with two parallel data movement. The prototype MDSP chip has been fabricated, is running at 30 MHz and the total gate count is about 68000. The performance comparisons show an improvement in various multimedia algorithms.