The ADSP-21161 SHARC®DSP is the newest member of the Super Harvard Architecture (SHARC) family of programmable DSPs. Capable of 600 million math operations per second (MFLOPs), the ADSP-21161 sets a new level of performance for low-cost SHARC DSPs - more than three times the performance for comparable models at about the same price. Its road map includes a cost-effective path to 1200 MFLOPS for $5 per unit and a performance-driven path to 10 GFLOPS and beyond."This newest edition to the SHARC family will open more possibilities for designers to design-in high performance digital signal processing into client-side applications and should help others reconsider applications they couldn’t do before with a single chip," said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts. "Analog Devices will certainly maintain customer loyalty with this road map."The ADSP-21161 DSP is the second member of the SHARC DSP family of 32-bit floating-point programmable DSPs to be based on a SIMD core architecture that is optimized for digital signal processing performance. Like all SHARCs, the ADSP-21161 is code-compatible with all other members of the family and supports both fixed- and floating-point data types. The ADSP-21161 lowers the price for SIMD SHARC DSP performance and is an outstanding DSP solution for many price-sensitive applications.State-of-the-Art Development ToolsThe ADSP-21161, like all SHARC processors, is supported by a complete set of software and hardware development tools. The VisualDSP++®tool set offered by Analog Devices includes an optimizing C/C++ compiler, integrated development environment (IDE), assembler, linker, splitter and cycle accurate simulator that support both C and assembly debugging. Emulation support is JTAG-based and ADI offers USB, PCI, and Ethernet based emulators.SHARC DSP RoadmapThere are two code-compatible paths that the SHARC DSP roadmap will follow. One optimized for high-performance multiprocessing systems and the other for price/performance. Performance is the key for multiprocessing applications and this is the reason that ADI will offer 10 GFLOP SHARC DSPs in the future. On-chip memory sizes will be balanced to match this performance with memories increasing to unprecedented levels (64 Mbit) using newly developed technologies.Industry leading price/performance will be the driver on the other path of the roadmap. In the future, these SHARC DSPs will offer an increase in performance to 1200 MFLOPs while decreasing price to as low as $5.00. This is required to support new technologies that demand substantial signal processing performance at consumer price points.