Freescale Ramps Production of 90nm Programmable Multi-Core DSP

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 5/10/2005

Freescale Semiconductor today is rolling out its first 90 nanometer design – a multi-core programmable digital signal processor.

The company claims to be the first to manufacture a multi-core programmable DSP at the 90nm process technology node and bring it to volume production.

The MSC8122 and MSC8126 DSPs each integrate four StarCore DSP cores onto a single die, effectively quadrupling performance over single-core DSP offerings. According to Freescale, they lead the industry in terms of low power consumption and combined performance, scaling up to 2 GHz. 

Freescale’s Danny Petkevich, marketing director for infrastructure DSPs was quick to point out that competitor Texas Instruments has only reached 1 GHz for its 90 nm DSP.

“Nobody in the industry has multi-core DSP at 90nm,” he said. “And TI is at 3 watts while we are at 2 watts,” he added, pointing out Freescale’s power advantage. 

TI announced volume production of its first 90nm DSP last fall.

Freescale’s new devices mark the second generation of multi-core devices from Freescale. And the product has already won a customer – its former parent company, Motorola, which plans to use one of the devices for its next generation CDMA IP-BSC equipment.

The higher performance and low power of multi-core DSPs should entice other customers as well, according to analyst firm, the Linley Group.

 “The compression, transcoding, and interworking requirements of voice in converged networks have historically been addressed by power-hungry DSP farms,” said Sanjay Iyer, a senior analyst there, in a statement. “Freescale’s new quad-core MSC8122 and MSC8126 DSPs leverage the advantages of 90 nm technology to deliver an unprecedented 8 GMACs of signal-processing performance at a low 2 watts. An array of these devices constitutes a programmable, power-efficient DSP platform that can support a variety of demanding applications, such as transcoding gateways and 3G wireless base stations.”

The two devices have passed industrial qualification at 500 MHz, 400 MHz and 300 MHz and are available for volume production, Freescale said.