Blackfin
The Blackfin is a microcontroller whose core was developed under the name Frio by the companies Analog Devices and Intel. It is a combination of a 32-bit RISC processor, and a 16-bit fixed-point DSP with two MAC units with SIMD capability. Thanks to extensive peripheral blocks the application areas are not only in the field of multimedia applications in mobile devices such as digital still and video cameras, but also in compute-intensive medical and industrial applications. In the automotive sector to Blackfin processors is mainly used in driver assistance systems and infotainment applications.
The maximum clock rate of the processor core is up to 750 MHz, it comprises a relatively large internal " L1 store ", which can also be used as a cache memory. The arithmetic unit ( ALU ) is comprised of two separate units with two parallel 40 -bit accumulators. In addition, the Blackfin so-called " hardware loops ", which loops can be realized without computing time for the loop counter. Here, a loop register ( " Zero - overhead loop registers " ) is loaded with an initial, a final address and a loop counter using a special machine instruction. The arbitrary assembler commands between the two address details are so often go through as it is specified in the loop register without conditional jump instructions are necessary. This makes it possible to efficiently implement loops, without any need to increment one loop counter and subsequently checked for reaching the termination condition of the software. This is particularly important in the implementation of short loops in the area of digital signal processing algorithms, as they are typically digital filtering or fast Fourier transform, in a speed advantage. Similar commands also have the digital signal processors SHARC family.
In addition, the architecture includes extensive input-output interfaces such as synchronous serial ports, so-called SPORTs for direct connection of analog -to-digital converters and digital - to-analog converter, UARTs, RTC, SDRAM controller and various input-output connections. Of particular note is the synchronous, 16 -bit wide PPI interface that is suitable for direct connection of graphical displays and CMOS sensors. The ever-increasing processor family also offers variants with two processor cores, L2 memory, Ethernet MAC, USB, CAN, I2C and others.
As a development system for the Blackfin is Analog Device software package VisualDSP and a proprietary real-time kernel called VDK available. In addition, there is a port of μClinux together with the necessary tools such as uClibc and GCC for the Blackfin. As a development interface and for programming the hardware JTAG connection is available. Linux supports the Blackfin architecture with kernel 2.6.22.