EDN's 19th Annual Innovation Awards Finalists

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Category: ASSPs
Finalist: Snapdragon platform with custom CPU (Qualcomm)

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform delivers a combination of low power consumption and high-performance processing. The superscalar microprocessor core driving the Snapdragon chip sets provides 2100 Dhrystone MIPS at 1 GHz when using 500 mW of power and features ARM version-7 compliance. Designed for battery-powered applications, the Scorpion suits always-awake, instant-on, and wirelessly connected mobile-computing devices.

The Scorpion provides designers with two instructions per clock-cycle execution using speculative out-of-order techniques and 128-bit parallel data processing using a 23-stage floating-point SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) pipeline. The processor can shut down half of its SIMD data path for power conservation. The Scorpion achieves enhanced multimedia performance using a high-performance, integrated VeNum coprocessor with ARM Neon acceleration. Additional features for the Scorpion include a 13-stage load/store pipeline and two integer pipelines, nonblocking interprocessor interrupts, 512 Mbits of internal stacked memory, and dynamic voltage and clock scaling.

Qualcomm’s dual-processor QSD8672 Snapdragon chip set includes two highly integrated 45-nm Scorpion processors capable of 1.5-GHz operation.