News and New Products

AMCC Delivers on Security-Enabled Processors

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 5/17/2005

Delivering on its plans to diversify through the acquisition a portion of IBM’s 400 series of embedded PowerPC processors just over a year ago, Applied Micro Circuits Corp. is introducing two new low-cost, low-power, security enabled 400 series PowerPC processors.

The 440GRx and 440 EPx are the second group of products launched by AMCC since the acquisition. Both of the new processors unveiled today at the Spring Processor Forum in San Jose include an optional integrated security accelerator designed to provide IP security and secure socket layer (SSL) acceleration in support of over 500 megabits per second bandwidth.

The 440Epx is targeted toward applications such as printing and imaging, wireless access, industrial control and many digital data and media processing applications, said Sam Fuller, VP of marketing for AMCC’s embedded group. This device includes a high-performance double precision floating point unit and a USB 2.0 host/device function with integrated PHY.  It also supports DDR2, an improvement from the last generation’s support of just DDR1, and the new product also widens the data path to 64 bits.

Creating products targeted to broad markets is new for the 400 series, Fuller said.

“IBM tended to develop the products to be more oriented around single customers,” he said. “They’d sell to anyone, but the products were very much focused and didn’t have a family resemblance or strict road maps as far as how the product would evolve.

“In contrast, we are trying to focus on these particular market segments as areas where we are making the investments.”

The 440GRx offers a simpler set of features and is targeted at networking applications.  For example, it does not offer USB or floating point unit support because networking applications don’t call for those features, said Fuller. 

“We’ve been able to reduce costs by removing those,” he said.

It does offer clock speeds of up to 667 MHz with a superscalar architecture that can execute two instructions per clock cycle.

AMCC will be sampling the devices in Q4 and expects to go to production in the middle of 2006. The company will offer the product in both leaded and lead-free packaging.

In addition the company will offer a full set of software and development tools.

AMCC acquired the IBM products in April 2004 to diversify from its traditional line of NPU switch fabric technologies.  Looking to storage area networks, the company purchased the IBM line.

“The ability to take the PowerPCs and couple them with network processors or storage processors was an added benefit,” Fuller said.