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Friday 25 July 2008
Components
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|NewsletterMicroprocessors and DSPs
Freescale goes after ARM in the embedded processor market
Thursday 5 April 2007
Freescale has licensed its low end 32-bit PowerPC cores to IPextreme to sell to automotive and industrial chip designers to take on the ARM core in embedded applications.
This is the first time that the PowerPC architecture has been offered to the general market, although Freescale has licensed the same core to a few companies, including STMicroelectronics, for automotive applications.
“We have done one off licenses to specific customers for Asics for a number of years, but this is the first general license agreement, taking advantage of Ipextreme’s strong position in the market,” said Glenn Beck, segment marketing manager for Freescale’s network and computing systems group and marketing chair of the Power.org trade association.
The deal covers four cores in the e200 family, from the e200z0 80MHz four stage core that just runs the basic variable length encoding (VLE) instruction set up to a 150MHz seven stage core with cache, memory management unit and floating point unit that runs the Power BookE full instruction set of other PowerPC chips.
“These are an ideal size for integration into SoCs or Asics, competitive with the ARM9 and things like that, and we already see its use across the automotive base, industrial and networking,” said Trent Poltronetti, v-p of marketing at IPextreme.
The basic cores can be used as controllers for intelligent peripherals subsystems, sensors or network nodes, with the larger cores as system controllers or aggregators in a network, but all running the same software. “It means you can have processing at the node as the aggregator, and that creates a nice software model,” said Beck.
The synthesisable cores are being productised for different chip design tool flows at the moment and will be supported by Ipextreme. “We are providing 100 per cent frontline support,” said Poltronetti. “We have staff that have designed other synthesisable Power architecture cores and they are working on the completion of the IP package and learning a lot about these specific cores.”
This is the first time that the PowerPC architecture has been offered to the general market, although Freescale has licensed the same core to a few companies, including STMicroelectronics, for automotive applications.
“We have done one off licenses to specific customers for Asics for a number of years, but this is the first general license agreement, taking advantage of Ipextreme’s strong position in the market,” said Glenn Beck, segment marketing manager for Freescale’s network and computing systems group and marketing chair of the Power.org trade association.
The deal covers four cores in the e200 family, from the e200z0 80MHz four stage core that just runs the basic variable length encoding (VLE) instruction set up to a 150MHz seven stage core with cache, memory management unit and floating point unit that runs the Power BookE full instruction set of other PowerPC chips.
“These are an ideal size for integration into SoCs or Asics, competitive with the ARM9 and things like that, and we already see its use across the automotive base, industrial and networking,” said Trent Poltronetti, v-p of marketing at IPextreme.
The basic cores can be used as controllers for intelligent peripherals subsystems, sensors or network nodes, with the larger cores as system controllers or aggregators in a network, but all running the same software. “It means you can have processing at the node as the aggregator, and that creates a nice software model,” said Beck.
The synthesisable cores are being productised for different chip design tool flows at the moment and will be supported by Ipextreme. “We are providing 100 per cent frontline support,” said Poltronetti. “We have staff that have designed other synthesisable Power architecture cores and they are working on the completion of the IP package and learning a lot about these specific cores.”
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