Designer Texas Instruments | Type Memory-Memory | |
 | ||
Endianness Little-endian for ARM, Big-endian for DSP | ||
The Texas Instruments DaVinci is a family of system on a chip processors that are primarily used in embedded video and vision applications. Many of the processors in the family combine a DSP core based on the TMS320 C6000 VLIW DSP family and an ARM CPU core into a single system on chip. By using both a general-purpose processor and a DSP, the control and media portions can both be executed by processors that excel at their respective tasks.
Contents
Later chips in the family included DSP only and ARM only processors. All the later chips integrate several accelerators to offload commodity application specific processing from the processor cores to dedicated accelerators. Most notable among these are HDVICP, an H.264, SVC and MPEG-4 compression and decompression engine, ISP, an accelerator engine with sophisticated methods for enhancing video, primarily input from camera sensors and an OSD engine for display acceleration. Some of the newest processors also integrate a vision coprocessor in the SoC.
History
DaVinci processors were introduced at a time when embedded processors with homogeneous processor cores were widely used. These processors were based either on cores that could do signal processing optimally, like DSPs or GPUs or based on cores that could do general purpose processing optimally, like, powerPC, ARM, StrongARM and so on. By using both a general-purpose processor and a DSP on a single chip, the control and media portions can both be executed by processors that excel at their respective tasks. By providing a bundled offering with system and application software, evaluation modules and debug tools based on Code Composer Studio, TI DaVinci processors were intended to win over a broader set of customers looking to add video feature to their electronic products.
TI announced its first DaVinci branded video processors, the DM6443 and DM6446, on 5 December 2005. A year later, TI followed up with DSP only versions of the chips in the family, called DM643x (DM6431, DM6433, DM6435, DM6437). On January 15, 2007, TI announced DM6441 that is pin-pin compatible with DM6446, but a lower end version With increased investment and significant focus on the DaVinci product line, following products were announced:
Today DaVinci processors are used in a variety of video and vision applications, including IP Security cameras, DVR/NVR systems, car blackboxes (car dvr or cab cam), drones, and so on.
Processors
Many of these model numbers should, formally, be prefixed by TMS320; the prefix is usually omitted for brevity. So for example the full part number for the DM6446 begins with TMS320DM6446 and has a suffix indicating its packaging type (a BGA flavor) and temperature rating.
Peripherals
The DaVinci processor families include a number of on-chip peripherals. Depending on the particular device, these may include:
Libraries
Operating systems
The DSP included in many DaVinci-based devices generally runs TI's TI-RTOS Kernel real-time operating system. When multiple, heterogeneous cores are included in the device (e.g. DM644x), DSP/BIOS Link drivers run on both the ARM processor and the DSP to provide communication between the two.
A number of operating systems for the DaVinci ARM and support DaVinci and the DSP/BIOS Link drivers: