Date: 16th Dec 2010

11 Tablet PCs powered by Freescale Semiconductor's ARM Cortex based i.MX chips

Freescale Semiconductor has announced Eleven of the tablet computer devices available in this holiday shopping season are based on its i.MX processors. Freescale claims it tops the tablet market by providing its semiconductor chips to more number of tablet computers compared to any other semiconductor vendor.

Based on the release it can be assumed most of the Chinese "white box" tablet manufacturers use Freescale Semiconductor's chips. Freescale says while western markets have focused primarily on a small number of high-profile tablet products, many of which are yet to ship in production, Freescale has quietly won a significant share of the fast-growing "white box" market, which has developed predominantly in Asia. Freescale points out the study done by ABI Research where it found that the majority of media tablets released commercially in 2010 use application processors from Freescale.

The type of tablets and e-readers designed using the Freescale ARM Cortex-A8 core based i.MX processors mainly i.MX51 anf i.MX53 are used for consumer Internet activities, such as browsing, social networking, shopping and consuming online content. Examples quoted include 7-inch tablet used as a browser-equipped touch screen controller for a premium connected color printer, and 5.5-inch and 10-inch color eReaders with color touch LCD screen with netsurfing and social networking application support.

Its easy for electronic equipment OEMs in emerging markets such as China and India to produce tablets and ereaders using Freescale processors and SoC chips due to the availability of reference design and hardware design support. The product differentiator can be mostly the embedded software.
Indian Embedded software companies can design a tablet in months with active hardware design support available from companies such as Freescale, Marvell and any such semiconductor vendors who support 100$ range tablet computer through their silicon devices. By leveraging software programming skills of its embedded systems software coders, its matter of taking risk to enter this lucrative but highly competitive market. With a powerful Android OS gaining full momentum building a tablet is not difficult.