Freescale Semiconductor kicked off the 2011 Freescale Technology Forum Americas today by demonstrating one of the industry's highest-performance quad-core applications processors.
The forum's opening keynote presentation featured a live demonstration presenting the multimedia capabilities of Freescale?s i.MX 6Quad applications processor.
The i.MX 6 series scales from one to four CPU cores to deliver headroom for many of today?s consumer electronics applications. Pin-compatible between family members, the i.MX 6 series devices are built on ARM Cortex-A9 cores with an array of integrated IP to deliver performance and scalability for manufacturers targeting tablet, eReader, automotive infotainment and other smart mobile device spaces.
The i.MX 6 series is comprised of the single-core i.MX 6Solo, dual-core i.MX 6Dual and quad-core i.MX 6Quad processor families. Product capabilities include dual-stream 1080p H.264 video processing for 3D class video decoding, Freescale?s triple play graphics architecture consisting of console-style 3D graphics with 200MT/s, separate 2D BLT engine for UI acceleration and separate 2D OpenVG engine for vector-based graphics.
For system design flexibility, the i.MX 6 series offers an array of features including:
- One-, two- and four-core offerings
- Display support for up to two (dual QXGA, 2048 x 1536) or four (dual WUXGA, 1920x1200 + dual HD1080) simultaneous displays
- Triple play graphics architecture with three physically separate graphic engines to best optimize gaming, UI and control-related graphics
- DDR3/LP-DDR2, BGA / POP packaging, PCIe/SATA/GbE, USB/SD/MIPI, CAN controller / MLB150 bus, LVDS
- 64-bit memory bus
Common SoC IP building blocks enable series-wide software and development tool compatibility, while integrated power management capabilities, a range of integrated I/Os and pin compatibility within package families reduce overall product complexity and development costs. Support for PC supply chain peripherals includes DDR3, 0.8 mm pitch packaging, PCIe, SATA and GbE, and operating system support offered for Google Android, QNX, Linux and Microsoft.
Freescale is also able to couple its i.MX processors with Freescale sensors into a single delivery.