Availability of DSP56K chips

From: Carlos Murillo <cmurillo_at_emtelsa.multi.net.co>
Date: Mon Dec 10 11:41:42 2001

Hi everyone;

It's been a while since I last coded stuff for robot control. The last
time I did that, the DSP56K (dsp56001 in particular) chips were
readily available. Now I need to develop a new platform for
research purposes and I am finding that the once ubiquitous dsp56k
chips have been eol'd (end-of-line'd in motorola parlance).
The suggested replacements are the dsp56301 or 303 chips, which
are code compatible, have 24 bit addressing (instead of 16 bit),
run at 80MIPs instead of 20, and have all the glue logic
for PCI or ISA interfacing built-in (dsp56301, which makes sense in my
application because the robot supervisor will be a Linux server
receiving commands from robot application clients over tcp/ip;
the dsp will be a slave that does the low level yet massive
number crunching stuff). So why don't I just go and choose
the newer parts? Several reasons:

1) I'd prefer to go with unix-based free software tools. There is
 a56k and gcc56k for the dsp56k. While the dsp56.3k is supposedly
 code-compatible, I am sure that some tweaking would be required to
 make these tools work with the new family, and compilers are not
 my area of expertise.

2) The older parts have roughly 100 pins and can be wirewrapped, the
 new parts have 192 pins and require modern pcb design and production
 techniques, which are outrageously expensive in this corner of the
 world. I am not comfortable wire-wrapping a design that runs at
 80MHz instead of 20.

3) From experience, I know that 20MIPS is enough for the task at hand.

So, I am faced with a familiar problem; an old part that will do the
job in a simpler design is no longer (readily) available; there is
a new, better, faster part, but there aren't as many software goodies
to go with it, and the hardware design tools and fabrication are more
expensive. The key issue is the present availability of the older
parts. I've checked some places and they seem to actually be out
of these chips. So my question to the list is: do you know where
to get dsp56001A chips? Or better yet, do you have some that you don't
plan to use?


carlos.


--------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
Received on Mon Dec 10 2001 - 11:41:42 GMT