DSP: TI vs ADI

This isn't a war thread so please just post experiences and facts and not stuff like "[Because my mother uses ADI] I use ADI and thats why TI sucks" kinda crap.

My project is a real time audio effects device that is either 24-bit @ 96khz or 192khz(depending on how much "room" I have for my algorithms).

The two processors I've been looking at that seem similar are

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(

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has 3*MMACS for about the same price)

I'm not sure which to go with. Each one seems to have there pro's and con's but it seems to be mostly balanced?

What are others experiences with these two?

One thing that I don't really like is that ADI doesn't seem to easily give out samples for there DSP chips. This is going to make it really hard to experiment with ;/

Thanks, Jon

Reply to
Jon Slaughter
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More than chip costs - do you own a development environment for either? Do you have experience with the development tools?

You're not gonna do a lot with a free chip. The AD chips would have you mucking around with a multi-hundred-pin BGA, something that a experienced hobbyist could do but would lead to disappointment for a newbie. The TI chip's 144-pin flatpacks are DIY-solderable if you make your own board and have some patience or a toaster oven.

Both TI and AD make starter kits/eval boards with software that very exactly tailored towards audio applications, although maybe they don't use the exact chips you mention above. Plan to sink in several hundred dollars at least. I've seen the AD eval boards for audio applications and they're really pretty slick to use for development. I just looked at the TI starter kits and they look just as good from the specs, but I've never used the development environment.

Tim.

Reply to
Tim Shoppa

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:56:12 GMT, "Jon Slaughter" wrote:

I've worked with both TI DSP and ADI DSP; but my experiences are more from writing software than from hardware design. The TI chips I worked with are the 'C30 and 'C40 and the ADI chips were in the ADSP-21xx line -- most recently, the ADSP-218x line. It's been only a few months since I last did something with the ADI DSP, but it's been probably close to 8-10 years since I worked on the TI DSPs. Also, my experiences with ADI DSPs go back to 1990, or so, and have been somewhat continuous since then. So take that difference of experience into account.

For the most part, I enjoyed working on both of them. The only issue that really bothered me about the TI DSPs regarded a problem in timing. I had crafted a 7-cycle loop which took 11 cycles, instead. This code was running from cache and should NOT have depended upon some external memory interface on the actual application board by a non-TI designer, but should have entirely depended upon the TI chip and its technical specs, including register interlock waits (which I also checked thoroughly.) In the end, the 3rd party board designer team and some technical folks at TI and I were on a conference call over this with the result that TI, after attempting to suggest (and failing to show) various areas where I may not have read their docs well enough, agreed that they had no idea why. The timing was easy to demonstrate, they had my source code and were able to duplicate it, and still could not explain it. In short, we never did find out why and I never did hear from TI about correcting their docs, either. Not a confidence lifting experience. By comparison, I have NEVER over the years found anything like that in the ADI DSPs -- they work as spec'd or else I always get some effort at ADI to explain the details. On the other side here, when ADI was changing FABs on one line (ADSP-2111 chip), we started getting something like a 40% failure on our own custom CPU-checkout software (we qualified the chips as they arrived.) They asked for, and got, a copy of my software for this and they confirmed the problems and cleaned them up in a few months' time.

Most recently, my experience with TI is with the MSP430 and it's been a good experience, by and large.

I don't know about these two chips. I would tend to expect ADI's DSP design to be fairly well-thought out. I would tend to look a little more closely at TI's design to make sure there weren't holes in it. But that doesn't mean that TI's design would have holes, only that because of my experiences earlier I'd be a little less willing to trust it all to fate and would want to spend a little more time carefully checking various algorithm ideas against it to be sure they had captured the more important details well. (But I expect they have learned well over the years, too.)

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Thanks Guys, I don't know which still but I'm leaning more and more towards ADI.

I suppose I could order some of the cheaper DSP's and play around with them. I'm just afraid of getting some of the more expensive ones and then ruining them in the hardware design process. Is it difficult to redesign the hardware around the higher end DSP's from a working design for the lower ends? Is it close to being a drop in replacement? I'm talking about a minimal system here with just ADC, DAC, DSP, and potentially some external memory.

(i.e., if I'm able to do a lower end design is a small step to using higher end DSP's?)

Jon

Reply to
Jon Slaughter

It can happen anywhere, even AD. I recently had that with the 7928 converter which for whatever reason didn't like the data on the clock edge prescribed in the data sheet. After several chats with app enigeering the consensus was "Ok, let's use the other edge then". That way they do work very nicely, and remarkably quiet. OTOH it also happened with TI parts, for example a TPS low dropout regulator with "pyrotechnic" behavior upon too fast an input voltage change. "Can't be ....". What irked me there was that they did not release the inner circuit diagram to me but also did not want to throw my circuit onto their Spice. Oh well, I just designed it out and have since refrained from ever using any LDO again, no matter from whom.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
Reply to
Joerg

The ADSP-21367 comes in a quad flat pack too, and has more internal memory and audio serial ports than the TI.

The development software would probably be the deciding choice if it was me. Stuf like cost, ease of use, soft cores available for stuff you want to do, example apps etc. If you can download trial version or whatever I could spend the time doing that.

Dave.

Reply to
David L. Jones

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