Availability of DSP56K chips

From: Curt Vendel <curt_at_atari-history.com>
Date: Mon Dec 10 14:30:40 2001

Those DSPs were used heavily in the Atari Falcon030 multimedia systems, Best
Electronics carries them in stock:

www.best-electronics-ca.com


Curt


----- Original Message -----
From: "Carlos Murillo" <cmurillo_at_emtelsa.multi.net.co>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 12:41 PM
Subject: Availability of DSP56K chips


>
> 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 - 14:30:40 GMT