News Flash
Sound Design's Hearing Instrument Platform Wins EDN Innovation Award
May 1, 2010 – On April 26, 2010, the winners of the 20th Annual EDN Innovation Awards were announced. The award in the Multiprocessing category went to Sound Design Technologies for Wolverine, its new open platform for hearing instruments. This platform uses four instances of an application-specific DSP which was designed with Target's IP Designer tool-suite.
Following its earlier Voyageur platform, Wolverine is Sound Design's second ultra-low power platform containing advanced DSPs optimized with Target's tools. Wolverine's DSPs provide significant instruction-level parallelism. On top of that, task-level parallelism is exploited by combining four DSPs with eleven hardware accelerators. With this massive amount of concurrency, the clock frequency can be reduced to as few as 2 MHz in a 90 nm device, while offering enough performance to run sophisticated audio algorithms, e.g. for acoustic beamforming.
Wolverine is the second platform developed by a Target customer that recently won an award for its low-power capabilities. Last December, SiTel Semiconductor won a Frost and Sullivan Green Excellence Award for the energy-efficiency of its Green VoIP chipsets for Voice-over-IP communication. SiTel's Green VoIP ICs are based on a unique multi-processor architecture, using two instances of the Gen2DSP