Freescale Makes Linux Move in China

By Suzanne Deffree -- Electronic News, 2/28/2005

Linux got a leg up from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and the China Ministry of Information Industry (MII), which announced this morning plans to jointly establish a lab based in Beijing to develop complete evaluation systems for the open operating system (OS) and PowerPC core.

Freescale is not a stranger to China. The company has similar labs established there on the automotive and wireless sides. This time around, they take aim at China's growing embedded space.

"We obviously feel that PowerPC, given its architecture and scalability from low performance to high performance, is an opportunity for us to participate in this market in much bigger ways than we have before," Glenn Beck, director of marketing for Freescale's computing platform division, told Electronic News.

"With this announcement, they [the MII and China] are now embracing microprocessor technology, specifically the PowerPC architecture, as well as the Linux operating system," Beck said, noting that the MII was "very willing to start a dialogue" about the lab.

Tom Halfhill, senior analyst with In-stat's Microprocessor Report, further noted that with its high importance in the global market, companies cannot afford to miss out on China. On the Linux end, however, he believes it's the China players who don't want to miss out.

"Most of the things I've been hearing are that the Chinese are not too thrilled with paying royalties for foreign intellectual property," he said. "So there's been a lot of talk about the Chinese jumping on the open source bandwagon."

Halfhill further said China may even develop its own OS to avoid IP issues all together.

"I think generally what the Chinese are going to do is move toward developing their own technology or use an open source technology, so they won't need to have a lot of currency flowing out for royalties. They realize they are going to be a big enough market that they don't have to be second fiddle. They could eventually lead the way on some of these things."
 
In this collaboration, Freescale and third-party companies will equip the lab with PowerPC processor-based development boards and workstations, as well as development tools, such as Freescale's CodeWarrior Development Studio. MII's China Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion (CSIP) Center will staff the lab and conduct system evaluation testing for benchmark suites of Linux products. It also plans to engage Chinese software companies in these projects, which are expected to provide application software porting for the PowerPC architecture and Linux OS.

"It is a very meaningful move to establish evaluation systems for Linux products," said Ni Guang Nan, Academia of China, said in a statement. "Considering the proliferation of Linux products in the embedded space in the future, there is an urgent need for these scientific and effective evaluation systems. This collaboration between CSIP and Freescale will be very helpful in promoting the application of Linux products in China."

In addition to establishing the joint lab, Freescale and CSIP are planning a joint PowerPC Linux Developers Forum in Beijing, scheduled for Q2. The forum will provide Chinese OEMs, software companies, universities and government entities hands-on training with PowerPC processor and Linux OS technologies, and it will also update the participants on the PowerPC architecture and Freescale product roadmap