William Wong
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ED Online ID #22010 |
October 21, 2009
Freescale and STMicroelectronics have joined forces to deliver a dual-core Power processor designed for the automotive market. Both vendors will deliver the same pin-compatible chips, providing customers with a second source. This is only part of the critical path. The architecture is based on a dual-core, dual-issue 64-bit 600 DMIPS e200 Power architecture. The chip can operate in SMP, AMP, and redundant mode, which takes advantage of the Redundancy Checker blocks that make sure both cores are operating in lockstep. The cores include a floating-point unit, cache, and memory management unit. The chip has a built-in Flexray network controller. Flexray is the high-reliability automotive network designed for tasks such as motor control and drive-by-wire. I/O peripherals include fast 12-bit analog-to-digtial converters (ADCs) and pulse-width modulators (PWMs) with cross-triggering support. This system has enough hardware and performance to handle a pair of motors.
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