June 10, 2013, Korea – Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE: FSL) has developed new solutions attractive to industrial and general-purpose markets by adding advanced floating-point technology to its innovative QorIQ Converge B4 family. The Freescale B4420 and award-winning B4860 SoC (System-on-Chip) solutions are based on SC3900 StarCore technology and are the first products in the B4 family to feature floating-point capabilities.

Freescale's advanced floating-point technology is designed to exceed the stringent requirements of computationally dependent applications, such as radar, medical and media imaging, and Cloud-RAN, including MAC scheduler processing requiring high computational accuracy, video analysis, security, industrial automation, and test and measurement systems.

Freescale has added floating-point arithmetic capabilities to the SC3900 processing unit, the industry's highest-performance fixed-point DSP core, to support these applications. These floating-point capabilities complement a wide range of advanced technologies already integrated into the QorIQ Converge SoC, such as high-performance processing, security, and network processing acceleration engines.

"Freescale's innovative QorIQ Qonverge product family boasts strong market recognition and widespread adoption across the telecommunications and network equipment industries," said Tareq Bustami, Product Manager for Freescale's Digital Networking business unit. "By adding advanced floating-point capabilities to support computationally intensive tasks, Freescale is enabling a broad base of existing customers to drive innovation through products that leverage the power, performance, and cost advantages of QorIQ Qonverge technology."

The B4860, based on advanced 28nm process technology, provides full programmable processing performance of up to 14.4GHz and integrates four e6500 Dual-threaded Power Architecture processor cores to achieve a CoreMark score of 61,000.
In addition, six fixed-point and floating-point SC3900FP DSP cores provide 230.4 GMACS fixed-point capabilities and 115.2 GFLOPS floating-point capabilities. Combined with the four AltiVec SIMD engines embedded in the e6500 core, a total of 172.8 GFLOPS of IEEE® 754 floating-point performance is achieved. This combination of powerful programmable cores, including embedded IP packet processing and security acceleration engines, provides exceptional flexibility and superior processing performance, facilitating the development of a wide range of applications for energy-saving systems that require massive processing power.

Freescale has added floating-point support to the production versions of the B4860 and B4420 SoCs while maintaining binary code compatibility with the existing SC3900 core. This supports continuity for customers developing software with these System-on-Chip (SoCs).

Unlike existing heterogeneous multicore architectures, the B4 product family provides a perfect cache consistency system, enabling the maintenance of data consistency for shared resources stored in local caches without software intervention, not only between L1 and shared L2 caches within core clusters but also between different types of core clusters and external interfaces. This performance enhances the ease of multicore programming and significantly shortens time-to-market.

In addition, it supports powerful System-on-Chip (SoC) computing resources by including low-latency and high-speed industry-standard interfaces. The B4860 SoC integrates a series of high-speed standard interfaces suitable for a multi-purpose SoC, including two 10Gbps XFI/XAUI Ethernet controllers, four 2.5Gbps/1Gbps SGMII Ethernet controllers, two Serial RapidIO® v2.1 controllers supporting eight 5G lanes, and a PCI Express® Gen2 controller supporting four 5G lanes. It also includes two DDR3/3L controllers, 64/72-bit 1.867GHz NAND/NOR flash controllers with ECC, and I2C, SPI, SDHC, USB, and UART interfaces.

Development tools and support
Freescale’s B4860 development integration system includes the CodeWarrior IDE (Integrated Development Environment), based on Eclipse technology, which provides a comprehensive multicore development platform. Tools provided include B4860QDS and B4420QDS development boards, C-optimized compilers for Power Architecture and StarCore cores, source-level multicore debuggers, device and core software simulators, optimized device drivers, Linux® SDKs, and software analysis tools for profiling and program/data tracing. In addition, Freescale and its partner network provide highly efficient MPU and DSP operating systems integrated with BSPs and SDKs containing optimized device drivers.

Supply situation
Evaluation boards supporting the B4860 and B4420 SoCs and Freescale floating-point technology are scheduled to be available in the third quarter of 2013. Further details can be found at freescale.com/QorIQQonverge.