Date: 4th Mar 09

 Freescale released new devices for automotive, industrial and consumer markets

For automotive electronics market:

Freescale Semiconductor has released a new LIN system basis chip (SBC) family of pin-compatible devices. The MC33910G5 integrate power management features, LIN physical layer, high-side driver, and DC motor pre-driver with current sensing.

The specialty of these devices is better electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and electrostatic discharge (ESD) performance for LIN vehicle networks.

This LIN SBC family is ideal for electromagnetically sensitive LIN slave applications, including designs that require motor control and current monitoring.
SBC coupled with a microcontroller is suitable for door systems, power mirrors, window lifts, sunroofs, multifunction steering wheels, HVAC and fan controls, lighting controls and LIN network-controlled wipers.

Freescale's LIN SBC devices are certified by conformance test labs, such as the C&S Group, and by EMC labs, such as IBEE-Zwickau, for general use in LIN/J2602 networks.

LIN SBC family features:
LIN 2.1 and J2602 certified physical layer interface
Power management
50mA 5V low dropout linear voltage regulator with low-voltage reset
Windowing watchdog with prescaler
Sleep and stop low-power modes
Cyclic wakeup and sense
System management
4x wake-up/high-voltage analog/digital inputs
Switchable 5V Hall-effect sensor supply
Precision differential amplifier with selectable gain for current sensing
Battery voltage, wake-up pins voltage and die temperature monitor
Application-specific drivers
2x low-side relay drivers for DC motor applications
2x 50mA high-side switch

Availability: Now in volumes

Price: (per 10K pieces):
MC33910G5AC - US$1.12
MC33911G5AC - US$1.25
MC33912G5AC - US$1.44

For Industrial and consumer markets:

Freescale Semiconductor is sampling two i.MX35 multimedia applications processors for industrial and consumer applications.
Freescale's pin-compatible i.MX353 and i.MX357 applications processors combine the ARM1136JF-S core with an OpenVG graphics engine, cost-effective DDR2 memory support and an array of connectivity interfaces. The i.MX353 processor targets cost-sensitive display-based systems, while the i.MX357 integrates an OpenVG 1.1-compliant graphics processing unit to address applications requiring an advanced user interface with higher levels of graphics, such as font rendering.

Freescale's i.MX353 and i.MX357 processors are targeted for industrial applications, such as factory automation, building control and HVAC systems that incorporate sophisticated human machine interfaces (HMI). The devices also provide the optimal multimedia capabilities needed for personal navigation devices (PNDs), e-books and other portable consumer electronics applications requiring graphical user displays.

Running at up to 532 MHz, the i.MX35 processors' ARM1136 core implementation features a vector floating point co-processor, a multi-level cache system and a RISC-based DMA controller.

Freescale's i.MX353 and i.MX357 multimedia applications processors support external memories, such as SDRAM, Mobile DDR and DDR2, SLC and MLC NAND flash, NOR flash and SRAM.

These two processors feature controller area network (CAN) and Fast Ethernet interfaces to support high-bandwidth data transfers for industrial applications. The processors also feature two USB ports with integrated PHYs, two MMC/SD/SDIO ports and a CE-ATA/SDIO port for external wireless modules.

The i.MX353 and i.MX357 processors contain an integrated image processing unit (IPU) with a dedicated camera interface and an LCD controller optimized to support 24-bit WVGA displays. The IPU handles advanced image processing and display management tasks, such as deblocking, deringing, color space conversion, independent horizontal and vertical resizing, and blending of graphics and video planes. The IPU is equipped with powerful control and synchronization capabilities to perform tasks with minimal to no involvement of the ARM11 CPU.

An available OpenVG 1.1 hardware accelerator is designed to deliver smooth textural visuals required in today's industrial and consumer interfaces that are rich in vector and raster graphics. The OpenVG core is capable of native acceleration of Adobe Flash.

Availability: Volume production planned to begin in Q2 2009.
Price: Suggested price of US$11.98 for 10 K pieces.