"Here’s a few pictures inside my Alesis Micron. I was expecting to
find a Freescale(Motorola) or Analog Sharc DSP but instead I found these low
cost Wavefront AL3101CG DSP’s. Nine of them to be exact, 8 for voices and 1 for
effects. These are interfaced to a Freescale Coldfire micro via some FPGA glue
logic. Some time ago Alesis sold semiconductors for audio and ADAT applications
but has since ceased doing that. I
wonder if Wavefront is the same group? Perhaps someone else knows."
If anyone knows more, feel free to comment.
If anyone knows more, feel free to comment.
I don't know if its significant but the ION is very similar except the 8 DSPs are marked Alesis.
ReplyDeletewavefront semiconductor = alesis.
ReplyDeleteYep, the semi division of Alesis became Wavefront Semiconductor. Not sure when, but probably around the time that the rest of Alesis was swallowed by Numark; indeed, it seems Wavefront is also owned by Numark (their corporate address is the same - 200 Scenic View Dr, Cumberland RI 02864).
ReplyDeleteThe AL3101s are pretty neat chips, though. They don't have a whole lot of memory (just 1K each program and data), which is presumably why the Ion's synthesis model doesn't include any "fancy" waveforms, but feed them a sample clock and a stream of input data, and they'll loop round their instruction RAM, executing (or skipping) all 1024 instructions, for each incoming sample - efficient, low-latency, predictable and easy to program. And rather similar in architecture to the Emu10k1 DSP element.
I suspect there's also an AL3201 lurking in the Micron somewhere - essentially a Picoverb on a chip, it has a larger memory and 16 algorithms in ROM, but only executes 128 instructions per sample. Ah yes - there it is, just to the top right of the big Altera chip.
Hello help AL3101 programer, PLEASE INFORMATION, mtcradiotv@hotmail.com
DeleteThanks guys for the information, that's very interesting.
ReplyDelete