William Wong
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ED Online ID #13208 |
August 2, 2006
This situation was similar to many of the other tech sessions I was able to peek into. There were quite a number of hands-on sessions where you could check out development kits for all sorts of platforms including wireless packages.
Before the tech sessions, Freescale’s Chief Executive, Michel Mayer, kicked off the forum with a company overview that hit the multimedia highlights. One of many cool products shown was Toshiba’s new Gigabeat video player based on an i.MX microcontroller. It more than doubles the battery life than its popular competition.
Mayer pulled in some help to show off a Freescale-based 3G multimedia cell phone. Downloading a multimegabyte video clip took less than 20 seconds compared to a non-3G phone that still had a lot to download after five minutes.
Even betting things are on the horizon. I got a glimpse at the i.MX27. This chip has a ARM926EJ-S 400MHz core and a significant chunk of hardware to handle MPEG-4 and H.263/H.264 multimedia decoding and encoding. The chunk is called SmartSpeed. It is designed to let the Arm processor twiddle its thumbs most of the time or at least do something other than churn multimedia streams into the right format. The Dynamic Process Temperature Compensation (DPTC) mechanism is designed to minimize the core voltage to levels needed to support the current operating frequency.
There is a lot more going on here at FTF but I’ll close with some news about FlexRay. Its finally going to show up in a real car from BMW this year. Freescale Flexray-equipped microcontroller will at the center of the control damping system.
For those who were here last year, the tech lab was more crowded than last year. There were more vendors on the floor. The only big ticket item on the floor was the University of Wisconsin’s diesel-hybrid SUV that used Freescale silicon, of course. This was FTF after all.
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