More than Meets the Eye

A quick look at the contents of this number of Challenge might give the impression that we set out to produce a special DSP issue. In addition to the article describing the innovative architecture of the ST100 core, which was recently unveiled at the Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose, two of the other main products featured in this issue - the Euterpe voice processors and the STA013 MP3 decoder - also use built-in DSPs to achieve their high performances.

In fact, this apparent focus on DSP is coincidental but illustrates one of ST's less well-known strengths: the depth and breadth of its competence in Digital Signal Processing. The Company does not compete in the stand-alone general purpose DSP market but it has accumulated a wealth of expertise in DSP which it uses internally to develop standard products and makes available to customers through its ASIC libraries.

Around ten years ago, ST pioneered the concept of embedding a DSP core in an ASIC device and launched the world's first embedded DSP core in 1991. Since then, PC sound cards, cellular phones and hard disk drives are among the applications where ST has shipped high volumes of customer-specific devices containing embedded DSPs, while many standard products such as modem chips are based on the same cores.

Today, ST designers can draw upon a range of DSP cores, including cores that are optimized for particular kinds of applications such as audio products. These are all part of one of the world's most comprehensive portfolios of libraries and technologies developed to ensure that ST can deliver leading-edge devices, whether they are standard products or complete system-on-chip solutions.

Two of the other articles in this issue underline this point. ST's patented Emulated EEPROM (E3PROM) technology offers a unique advantage to designers who need a high performance microcontroller with on-chip Flash memory for code storage, while the recent acquisition of Vision Group opens up many exciting new opportunities for integrating image capture and image processing on the same chip.