Freescale Launches New ARM Processing Platform

ARM chips are best known for their presence in phones, but Freescale offers ARM platforms for other things, in this case many peripherals and other devices used in enterprise and industrial sectors.

Anyone wondering what Freescale was up to needs guess no longer, as the company has come clean on its recent research and development results.

What Freescale invented is an ARM platform for flexible memory interface, on-chip memory, high-speed communications interfaces, programmable timers, digital-to-analog converters, analog-to-digital converters and even security-related devices.

The platform combines a Cortex-A5 processor with a Cortex-M4 microcontroller, for making embedded microprocessors (eMPUs).

Said microprocessors will eventually be paired with Kinetix MCUs and i.MX application processors, for complete embedded solutions.

“Industrial applications like factory automation, medical devices and appliances are starting to incorporate more connectivity and sophisticated GUIs to give end users a simpler, safer and more consumer-like experience. Adding these features to a real-time system has traditionally been done by adding an applications processor on top of a real-time controller, which can be a real challenge for industrial system developers,” said Tony Massimini, chief of technology for Semico Research.

“Freescale is taking a unique approach with a new product platform that merges an apps processor and real-time controller into one device to reduce complexity and cost, combined with a ‘software before silicon’ strategy for earlier software development.”

Speaking of software, Freescale will bundle the silicon with an IPC (inter-process communication) application programming interface (API).

With this, customers should have all they need to tailor and build whatever devices their operations require.

The initial software platform will be available later this quarter (Q4, 2011) while the first industrial eMPUs product families will appear in Q1 2012.

“With this platform, Freescale is dramatically simplifying the development challenge of adding applications processing to a system designed for real-time control,” said Reza Kazerounian, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Microcontroller Solutions Group.

“We’re the first to provide extensive MCU and apps processing capabilities in an integrated hardware-software based solution, setting a new standard for the design of systems that need rich apps in real time.”