The device is a member of TI's TMS320C5000™ fixed-point Digital Signal Processor (DSP) product family and is designed for low-power applications.

The fixed-point DSP is based on the TMS320C55x™ DSP generation CPU processor core. The C55x™ DSP architecture achieves high performance and low power through increased parallelism and total focus on power savings. The CPU supports an internal bus structure that is composed of one program bus, one 32-bit data read bus and two 16-bit data read buses, two 16-bit data write buses, and additional buses dedicated to peripheral and DMA activity. These buses provide the ability to perform up to four 16-bit data reads and two 16-bit data writes in a single cycle. The device also includes four DMA controllers, each with 4 channels, providing data movement for 16-independent channel contexts without CPU intervention. Each DMA controller can perform one 32-bit data transfer per cycle, in parallel and independent of the CPU activity.

The C55x CPU provides two multiply-accumulate (MAC) units, each capable of 17-bit x 17-bit multiplication and a 32-bit add in a single cycle. A central 40-bit arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) is supported by an additional 16-bit ALU. Use of the ALUs is under instruction set control, providing the ability to optimize parallel activity and power consumption. These resources are managed in the Address Unit (AU) and Data Unit (DU) of the C55x CPU.

The C55x CPU supports a variable byte width instruction set for improved code density. The Instruction Unit (IU) performs 32-bit program fetches from internal or external memory and queues instructions for the Program Unit (PU). The Program Unit decodes the instructions, directs tasks to the Address Unit (AU) and Data Unit (DU) resources, and manages the fully protected pipeline. Predictive branching capability avoids pipeline flushes on execution of conditional instructions.

The general-purpose input and output functions along with the 10-bit SAR ADC provide sufficient pins for status, interrupts, and bit I/O for LCD displays, keyboards, and media interfaces. Serial media is supported through two MultiMedia Card/Secure Digital (MMC/SD) peripherals, four Inter-IC Sound (I2S Bus™) modules, one Serial-Port Interface (SPI) with up to 4 chip selects, one I2C multi-master and slave interface, and a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) interface.

The device peripheral set includes an external memory interface (EMIF) that provides glueless access to asynchronous memories like EPROM, NOR, NAND, and SRAM, as well as to high-speed, high-density memories such as synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) and mobile SDRAM (mSDRAM). Additional peripherals include: a high-speed Universal Serial Bus (USB2.0) device mode only, and a real-time clock (RTC). This device also includes three general-purpose timers with one configurable as a watchdog timer, and an analog phase-locked loop (APLL) clock generator.

In addition, the device includes a tightly-coupled FFT Hardware Accelerator. The tightly-coupled FFT Hardware Accelerator supports 8 to 1024-point (in power of 2) real and complex-valued FFTs.

Furthermore, the device includes three integrated LDOs (DSP_LDO, ANA_LDO, and USB_LDO) to power different sections of the device. The DSP_LDO can provide 1.3 V or 1.05 V to the DSP core (CV_DD), selectable on-the-fly by software as long as operating frequency ranges are observed. To allow for lowest power operation, the programmer can shutdown the internal DSP_LDO cutting power to the DSP core (CV_DD) while an external supply provides power to the RTC (CV_DDRTC and DV_DDRTC). The ANA_LDO is designed to provide 1.3 V to the DSP PLL (V_{DDA_PLL}), SAR, and power management circuits (V_{DDA_ANA}). The USB_LDO provides 1.3 V to USB core digital (USB_V_DD1P3) and PHY circuits (USB_V_DDA1P3). The RTC alarm interrupt or the WAKEUP pin can re-enable the internal DSP_LDO and re-apply power to the DSP core.

The device is supported by the industry’s award-winning eXpressDSP™, Code Composer Studio™ Integrated Development Environment (IDE), DSP/BIOS™, Texas Instruments’ algorithm standard, and the industry’s largest third-party network. Code Composer Studio IDE features code generation tools including a C Compiler and Linker, RTDX™, XDS100™, XDS510™, XDS560™ emulation device drivers, and evaluation modules. The device is also supported by the C55x DSP Library which features more than 50 foundational software kernels (FIR filters, IIR filters, FFTs, and various math functions) as well as chip support libraries.