Freescale Technology Forum 2014 overview

The Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) is going on this week in Dallas. More than 2,000 designer engineers, applications engineers, industry experts, executives, and Freescale partners will participate in four days of training/workshops/demonstrations.

Look HERE for videos of the keynote presentations that have been done so for.

At THIS Freescale site you can view the slides of many of the technical presentations.

The FTF also has over 250 demos in a state-of-the-art technology lab – some from Freescale and some from partners.

Here is an overview of six Freescale new product introductions from FTF:

The Kinetis V Series MCUs streamline next-generation motor control and digital power conversion applications. The KV3x and KV4x series MCUs are based on Cortex-M processors The MCUs and the Kinetis Motor Suite help to make motor control application development flexible, faster and more cost-effective

The QorIQ LS2045A and LS2085A network processor SoCs are based on Layerscape architecture and use either four or eight Cortex-A57 64-bit cores. They have dual DDR4 memory controllers with ECC along with eight 10-Gbit interfaces, and eight 1-Gbit interfaces, with L2 switch capabilities. The SoCs have an advanced datapath engine capable of 40 Gbit/s complex packet processing with acceleration technology.

The QorIQ T1023, T1024, and T4080 SoCs use PowerQUICC processors. The T1023 device targets 802.11ac smart edge WLAN access points and branch routers, while the T1024 delivers cost-effective upgrades for printing and imaging, traditional control applications and line cards. The T4080 integrates the high performance AltiVec engine and leverages four dual-threaded, Power Architecture-based e6500 cores running up to 1.67 GHz.

The second generation of Kinetis K series microcontrollers are cost-effective devices that start at just $0.79 ea/10,000 – the industry’s lowest priced Cortex-M4 based MCU with floating point unit reaching 100 MHz with 64 Kbytes of Flash. They run at up to 180 MHz and have a floating point unit with 8 Kbyte I/D cache, 2 Mbyte of flash and 256 Kbyte of SRAM.

Freescale’s IoT gateway is a flexible hardware platform powered by a Freescale i.MX 6 applications processor using a Cortex-A9 core. The platform runs Oracle Java SE Embedded and is suitable for basic networking and sensor connectivity. It supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and 802.15.4 wireless interfaces. Measuring just 5.3 x 3.9 x 0.8 inches, the $159 unit will be available later in September.

The triple-core MAC57D5xx helps enhance safety by separating key instrument cluster hardware and software via concurrent operation of separate operating systems on each core. Independent operation of an AutoSAR OS on the ARM Cortex-M4 core, and a graphics OS on the ARM Cortex-A5 core allows for enhanced safety. A Cortex-m0 handles I/O functions. The device is said to offer 1.7x higher performance than any currently available automotive instrument cluster MCU and it has 2D graphics accelerators, a head-up display (HUD) warping engine, dual TFT display drive, and stepper motor drivers. Sampling in June.

The expanded i.MX 6 architecture has both Cortex-A9 and Cortex-M4 cores to provide power efficient real-time deterministic control. The chip will have dual-port GbE audio video bridging (AVB) for quality-of-service in automotive and other applications with enhanced traffic shaping and packet prioritization. It also carries a 2D and 3D graphics processing unit for enhanced HMI development. To be introduced later this year.