Improv Systems, Inc. was founded in 1997, by veterans and executives of the semiconductor and EDA industries, to empower a new generation of SoC designs. The key to these designs is the effective merger of advanced IP, tools and domain expertise into an integrated methodology and solution.
The central component of the Improv methodology is a highly configurable, multiprocessor architecture called the Jazz PSA platform including the Jazz Processor. Rather than a fixed processor and instruction set, designers can create their own application-optimized processor cores - Jazz processors that are customized by the designer for their specific product or application domain. The Jazz processor is a very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture that provides high performance through parallel execution of operations. This type of processor is best suited for compute-intensive application like media processing, digital signal processing and communication applications.
The Jazz PSA Composer Tool Suite provides designers the capability to configure and customize the Jazz DSP processor and Jazz PSA platform. Specific application requirements can be met by exploiting the configurable nature of this DSP using the tool suite. Integrating these customizations into the Jazz Standard Tool Suite is instantaneous, enabling the development of designer-defined DSPs in under an hour.
The Jazz DSP processor is a configurable VLIW processor architecture from Improv Systems. It incorporates many advanced architecture features including overlaid datapaths, a distributed register system, code compression, and power management. The Jazz DSP processor is supported by a flexible design methodology used to customize the computational resources and instruction set of the processor, while supporting a comprehensive tool chain. Designers can incorporate custom RTL blocks and instructions to create a designer-defined DSP core.
The Jazz Generator is a productivity tool that automates the compilation and integration of files needed to build a configured Jazz processor. It generates a complete RTL netlist of a configuration of the Jazz PSA Platform and creates Implementation Kits of the targeted configuration.
Improv’s Jazz Rehearsal XE-2 development board is an FPGA-based development board for validating Jazz processors and integration interfaces. The board accelerates simulation, verification and validation of 2-4 custom configured Jazz processors and integration logic including Jazz HBI, Jazz TSI and Jazz DCI integration blocks. It features a PCI host processor interface and two Xilinx field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Processors can be configured in 16 or 32 bit versions.
The Jazz PSA Standard Tool Suite is the software development environment for the Jazz DSP processor. The suite enables design teams to create customized, high performance application software for the Jazz PDS processor through intuitive, object-oriented programming. A developer utilizes the Jazz PSA Standard Tool Suite to create an application program, develop a corresponding test bench and utilize the compiler, instruction-set simulator and optional FPGA emulation capability to execute, evaluate and verify the performance of the application code.
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