Delivering on its promise to offer a portfolio of highly customizable DSP (digital signal processor) and high performance analog products to meet the needs of medical imaging manufacturers, Texas Instruments (TI) has announced the availability of an embedded processor software toolkit developed for medical diagnostic ultrasound manufacturers.
The first in a family of products, TI’s toolkit helps manufacturers quickly and easily develop ultrasound applications on the improved processing power of TI’s C64x+™ DSP platforms, enabling clinics and practitioners to deliver faster, more accurate results to their patients.
TI’s new embedded processor software toolkit (STK) for medical diagnostic ultrasound leverages the performance and power consumption of TI’s C64x+ architecture to shorten the development time of an ultrasound system by providing optimized implementations of commonly used processing blocks. TI is also offering the TMS320C6455 DSP starter kit (DSK) for medical imaging, a low-cost development platform which provides manufacturers with an easy-to-use solution for evaluating and harnessing the power of highly programmable DSP algorithms, affording a head start in medical imaging product development time.
Key features and benefits
- Optimized C64x+ software modules of common ultrasound processing blocks allows manufacturers to get to market faster while improving coding efficiency, yielding higher performance systems at lower cost and lower power
- Complete source code for all modules affords developers full visibility and enables module customization and differentiation
- Well defined APIs simplify development by abstracting modules and enabling easy integration into existing systems
- Complete benchmarks allow for quick and easy evaluation of module implementation and comparisons to other architectures
- Full test benches provide assurance of module functionality while aiding in evaluation and development; Custom test vectors can easily be added to check functional and cycle performance for any input
- Full documentation of each optimized module provides coding illustrations on computational optimization methods for the C64x+ core which can be used as a model to optimize other code modules
- One year of support and release patches include up-to-date releases and support by TI’s applications team over the next 12 months
“Over the next few years we anticipate a significant shift in medical imaging applications, from traditional imaging modalities limited to basic diagnostic functions to a new ecosystem comprised of small form factor, highly accurate portable devices,” said Susie Inouye, research director and president of Databeans. “It is clear that manufacturers seeking to design more flexible, affordable and portable ultrasound equipment can benefit from the low power, high-performance and flexible programmability of TI’s digital signal processors.”
Pricing and availability
An evaluation version of the software toolkit, designed to give developers a chance to evaluate the product, is free for a period of 90 days. The software toolkit and DSP starter kit are available from TI today. Visit our website for more details.