Applied Micro Circuits PowerPC 405EX processor

Applied Micro Circuits PowerPC 405EX processor

The Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) PowerPC 405EX processor really knocked our socks off last fall when the editorial taff were reviewing Product of the Year candidates. This 600-MHz chip has everything you need for a modern embedded system — PCIexpress, 2 GbE ports, USB 2.0 OTG, a security engine, 900+ DMIPS performance; and the 90-nm process IC takes only 1.5 W max and costs just $17. What more could you ask for?!

Perrine Peresse, Ramesh Madhira, Veronique Guerre, and Venky Venkatesh.

The expert design team was led by Ms. Perrine Peresse, who moved to AMCC’s Sunnyvale facility from an AMCC office on the French Riviera at Sophia-Antipolis (near Nice) in 2006. The Director of Engineering, Venky Venkatesh, and Perrine, worked hand in hand with Veronique Guerre, Project Manager, and Ramesh Madhira, Design Manager, to squeeze all the functions we listed above into the chip.

The team was an early adopter of a verification environment based on System Verilog from Mentor Graphics (with Advanced Verification Methodology) that allowed them to perform concurrent multiflow testing on the chip. They included the ability to handle VoIP tasks in the IC, while making certain it was applicable to a wide variety of applications.

The chip also has JTAG and real-time trace support for debugging and a evaluation kit is available.

The original design specification was developed with a lead customer and a team orchestrated by Marketing Manager Mike Servedio and Vice President Sam Fuller. One product constraint was that while the chip was to specifically target 802.11n and WiMAX secure wireless access points, the team wanted to be certain it would serve well in many applications.

The design team put an external bus controller on the chip along with a high-performance implementation of the PowerPC CoreConnect internal bus system that was a key element in getting the performance they needed. And, they did this while keeping to tough die size/package constraints making this perhaps the most cost-effective PowerPC implementation ever.

Jim Harrison