Freescale ColdFire Processors Announced

Freescale Semiconductor just announced the official launch of a new generation of processing units that are now available under the commercial designation of MCF544x and they are aimed at providing users with a low power but high performance solution for building embedded systems that are running the Linux operating system.

The new products from Freescale are based on the V4 ColdFire internal hardware microarchitecture and according to the news site techtree, that cites the manufacturing company, they are powerful enough in order to deliver a performance level equivalent with 410 Dhrystone MIPS, while maintaining a very low energy footprint of only 380mW.

This new line of products from Freescale Semiconductor includes 12 models of processing units that are each made of an integrated memory controller that can work with either DDR2, DDR1 or DDR1 mobile memory modules, an integrated 10/100 Ethernet controller, a USB on the go chip, as well as advanced technology attachment (ATA), and peripheral component interconnect (PCI) in order to support connectivity with a large number of computer devices and peripherals.

For ease of expansion, these new processing units from Freescale are also coming equipped with a non-volatile memory interface that uses the serial data transferring protocol and they are also integrating a dual-role master/slave serial peripheral interface. The manufacturing company says that these processors are well suited for consumer applications and that they could be very well employed in network-attached storage devices and Ethernet gateways as well as in embedded computing systems which are typically used for industrial control, embedded Voice over IP (VoIP), factory automation and so on.

The new Freescale products are now readily available in quantity and they come with a price tag of $9.95 when purchased in 10,000 quantities, while also being supported by evaluation kits, Linux compatible mainboards and a large number of software tools and applications.