Freescale Accelerates Network Systems Design

It is not just about performance, but the applications development acceleration they offer. This is one of the key messages from Lisa Su, Freescale Semiconductor’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Networking and Multimedia Group, during her media briefing yesterday here at the Freescale Technology Forum 2010 in Orlando, Florida. She is referring to the features of the company’s devices, which, apart from providing higher performance, helps accelerate designs due to the numerous peripheral support they offer.

Freescale’s Networking and Multimedia Group accounts for about 25 percent of the company’s business, according to Su. Within its segment, the communications processor line is the biggest. At present, the company has just completed the first generation of its QorIQ roadmap, with the launch of the quad-core P3 platform (P3041), which brings the cost-performance of QorIQ embedded multicore processors and expands the reach of Freescale’s P4 platform into lower power applications. This is on the heels of the recent announcement of the single-core 64-bit P5010 and dual-core 64-bit P5020 processors, which utilize the latest e5500 core.

The P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5—the first-generation QorIQ—offer a diversity of embedded applications in terms of price and performance, according to Su. But, as she said, it is not just the performance of these devices, but most importantly how these solutions help bring products to market faster with all the IP they offer, which ease the design process for engineers. She also added that Freescale is continuing to invest in game-changing technology for the next-generation of QorIQ platforms.

Base station in a chip
Freescale is now focusing on more integration, higher performance and power efficiency, more powerful cores in many-core applications, and next-node process technologies, including 32nm and 28nm, according to Su. She said that in response to the challenge in the market relative to the service providers and relative to bandwidth, which are all driven by the continuing explosion of traffic, the company has been focusing its efforts on reducing the number of components in base station boards.

The networking business is what’s driving Freescale’s digital signal processor (DSP) line, Su said. One of the company’s efforts on this front is increasing the performance of the devices for efficiency. Apart from the femtocell segment, new spaces such as the WiMAX and LTE are giving the company more opportunity for growth, according to Su.

Freescale QorIQ communications platforms

Freescale


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