Freescale Semiconductor has introduced a low-cost evaluation module for the MSC815x and MSC825x family of programmable digital signal processors (DSPs) intended for medical, aerospace, defense and test/measurement applications.

The MSC8156 Evaluation Module (MSC8156EVM) is a PCI Express short card form factor development solution that allows for the deployment of Freescale’s highest performing DSPs alongside the company’s QorIQ P4080 and P2020 multicore communications processors in a Single Board Computer format.

MSC8156EVM comes with Freescale’s SmartDSP OS (SDOS), the royalty-free DSP operating system, with integrated DSP drivers for many peripherals such as PCI Express, Ethernet and Serial RapidIO as well as DDR memory interfaces. It also includes a three month evaluation license for Freescale’s full-featured, Eclipse-based CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Tools included in the offering are an efficient SC3850 C compiler, assembly optimizer, debugger and extensive profiling and software analysis tools. The EVM also includes intrinsics, application notes and 40+ DSP libraries that help accelerate a customer’s design to market – whether porting from previous StarCore families or competitors’ DSP architectures.

Customers can purchase the evaluation kit for the price of $495 USD. Customers wishing to migrate to the more comprehensive MSC8156 Application Development System (MSC8156ADS) who have purchased the MSC8156EVM will receive a discount off the purchase of the MSC8156ADS platform. The discount represents the $495 cost of purchasing the MSC8156EVM.

About the MSC8156 Digital Signal Processor
The MSC8156 DSP delivers flexibility, integration and affordability while answering the demand from many of today’s DSP applications requiring ultra-high computational performance. The MSC815x and MSC825x DSPs are an ideal choice for many DSP applications including medical, aerospace, defense and test/measurement, multi-standard wireless base stations, video conferencing servers and voice gateways. These families of DSPs offer up to a total of 48 GMACs (Giga Multiply and Accumulate) per second of DSP core performance and the MSC815x family features a MAPLE coprocessor with DFT/ FFT, Turbo and Virterbi acceleration.

Availability
The MSC8156EVM has a suggested resale price of $495 (USD) and is available now.