Freescale Semiconductor aims to improve power efficiency in real-time control and graphics systems with an asymmetrical-multiprocessing-architecture platform that combines an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller and a Cortex-A5 processor.
The company says there are benefits of combining the MCU and apps processor in real-time systms.
"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 v-p and general manager of Freescale's microcontroller group.
This is the first in a family of embedded microprocessors (eMPUs) from Freescale.
To support the hardware platform, the company is offering an inter-process communication (IPC) application programming interface (API).
"Customers will be able to use the hardware and IPC API to create differentiated applications without worrying about how the high-level OS (like Linux) and RTOS (such as MQX) communicate with each other," said Freescale.
There will be a software development platform.
The need for real-time control + applications processing
The focus is human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for industrial systems.
"Processing for HMI is focused on efficiently processing pixels and displaying them on a screen, while guaranteed determinism requires highly predictable response times for tasks. The solutions available until now have focused on one or the other of these processing needs," said the firm.
"As a result, application developers have taken on the burden of creating a full solution by combining different pieces of silicon and developing software to enable real-time control and HMI solutions that work together," said Freescale.
Freescale plans to offer the initial software development platform for its new product platform later this quarter and intends to announce the first industrial-focused eMPU product families based on the new architecture in Q1 2012.
Derivatives of the new platform are planned for the automotive infotainment market. Automotive device details will be announced in Q2 2012.
The Cortex-A5 processor is ARM's more energy efficient updgrade to the ARM926EJ-S and ARM1176JZ-S processors.
www.freescale.com
www.arm.com
