MIPS adds SIMD instructions in DSP extension

MIPS Technologies Inc. has launched DSP ASE, digital signal processing extension to the MIPS architecture.

The DSP ASE includes 8, 16 and 32bit SIMD instructions for saturated and fractional math and is supported by GNU-based software development tools, as well as pre-written software in the MIPS DSP library.

The DSP ASE is available for licensing by MIPS32 and MIPS64 ISA customers. Additionally, this technology will appear in future 32 and 64bit cores developed by MIPS Technologies, the company said.

The DSP ASE improves signal-processing performance up to 300 percent over a range of embedded applications, claimed MIPS. The new DSP extension comprises a set of new instructions and states in the integer pipeline of MIPS Technologies cores and requires less than six percent additional silicon area to implement in a 24K-class core, it added.

"MIPS Technologies continues to add optimized software to its leading synthesizable and hardened core product lines to reduce the SoC design challenges in our target markets," said Russ Bell, VP of marketing at MIPS, in a statement. "The DSP architectural extension is the latest example of our strategy to expand the reach and capability of the MIPS ecosystem. The market response has been overwhelmingly positive and reinforces our position as the market and technology leader in embedded design."

Popular DSP operations, such as MAC, dot-product, absolute and complex-multiply are supported along with such operations as variable bit insert/extract and virtual circular buffers. In terms of tools, MIPS provides a tuned compiler with a C front-end, assembler, debugger, instruction-set simulator, and performance analysis tools.

- Peter Clarke

Silicon Strategies