Freescale Announces 45nm PowerQUICC III Communications Processor

Freescale Semiconductor, one of the world's leading manufacturers of semiconductors, has just announced the introduction of its new PowerQUICC III communications processor, designed as a high-performance, low-power device based on the company's 45nm SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology. According to the company, the newly announced processor has been designed to support a wide range of wireless protocols, enabling a performance of 1.3GHz, while also providing a power of envelope of sub-10 watts.
 

“By supporting a broad array of wireless standards, Freescale’s MPC8569E PowerQUICC III processor brings leading-edge capabilities into the wireless and wireline infrastructure space,” said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Networking and Multimedia Group. “Combining 45-nm process technology with our PowerQUICC architecture enables an extremely low-power and high-performance device for a wide range of cost-effective solutions.”
 

With the continuous development of wireless technologies such as 3G or WiMAX, the new solution from Freescale comes to address the increasing performance and protocol support requirements. Boasting a highly integrated design, the new MPC8569E PowerQUICC III processor allows for single-chip solutions, where multiple devices were previously required.
 

The processor is designed to take advantage of the enhanced QUICC Engine technology, delivering double the performance of previous generations. The device also includes a high-performance CPU, featuring 512KB of L2 cache memory, one 64-bit or two 32-bit DDR2/DDR3 memory controllers, SGMII, serial RAPIDIO interconnects, USB 2.0 and PCI Express technology.
 

In addition, Freescale announced that the new MPC8569E is based on an enhanced Power Architecture e500 core and scales up to 1.3GHz. This ultimately delivers a solution that is capable of providing the end user with aggressive performance-per-Watt capabilities.

According to the semiconductor company, the MPC8569E processor is already sampling, while the suggested resale pricing starts at US$80 in 10,000 unit quantities.