Freescale to pitch versatile, but affordable automotive SOC solution

2012-07-11 JH Bae

(iTers News) – A growing number of cars are increasingly integrated with consumer electronics, computer and even communications technologies, featuring 3D displays, voice-and gesture-activated UI, Ethernet, HDMI, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity

The concentration of such data-intensive applications as well as diverse network protocols in a car is clamoring for as powerful a CPU as those in tablet PCs or smartphones as well as 100 million lines of software codes to drive up all those applications.

Yet, car makers are so price-conscious that they are affordable SOC solutions, too

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. is turning both the technological and affordability challenge into its advantage, scrambling to create a whole bunch of chip design and fabrication ecosystem for a powerful, affordable entry-level SOC solution. .

At the forefront of its scramble is its Vybrid automotive SOC, system-on-chip solution, which uniquely combines ARM Cortex A-5 and ARM M4 cores in a single die.

Coming complete with 2D-ACE, OpenVG hardware accelerator, video ADC and on-chip SRAM, radio software stack, the highly integrated SOC solution can perform MPU-as well as MCU-generic task simultaneously.

Dennis Ahn Sr. Automotive Field Application Engineer said, “The combination of MPU and MCU functionality will be a good value for money for car makers who are looking for low-cost, but powerful SOC solution. Added he, ”It is based ARM core so that it is reusable.”

Production samples will be available in March 2013, and mass-production is scheduled for July 2013.