By Jim Trudeau

By the time you read this the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will be a thoroughly done deal, and we will be well on our way into 2011 and another trip around the sun. It’s always an adventure. Freescale started the year off announcing the i.MX 6 series of applications processors, based on the ARM Cortex-A9, just in time for said show. I love marketing: have we got a deal for you.

Seriously, it is no accident that 20+ tablet designs based on Freescale hardware were on display at CES. Let’s take a look at package deals, because that’s what we’re talking about with our approach to the i.MX 6 series, and the current family of i.MX53 and its brethren. In fact, in my opinion the package deal is fundamental to Freescale’s relationship to its customers.

The problem with some package deals is that they are a bit like Hobson’s choice. You can get any deal you want, as long as it’s the dealer’s choice. With this kind of package you get stuff you don’t want or need, like that all day excursion to the underwater basket weaving factory in your vacation. Not my idea of a holiday, or a good deal.

Well, especially when it comes to the place where software meets silicon and products meet the market, one size – and one package – decidedly does not fit all. We would like to stay in business and grow, and we value our customers. So our approach to the package is quite a bit different. Nonetheless, it is a package because the technical world has become a very complicated place. We have bundled the things you need to get well down the road toward a product. The other extreme would be for us to just hand you some chips and say “Here you go, have fun, you can figure it out.” If we did that I don’t think we’d last very long.

The chip

At the root of the package is, of course, the silicon. For the i.MX 6 series, the first variable of our package is the core itself. Do you need one, two or four cores? You can pick processor speeds up to 1.2GHz. It’s qualified at consumer, industrial, and automotive temperature ranges, with PoP or BGA packaging choices. Lots of options and flexibility here.

The reference design

The next dimension is the reference design. We took that silicon and designed three reference platforms aimed at three markets. This is yet another dimension to the i.MX package. We’re building on our experience with the i.MX53 family and extending this into our new line. The market categories we aim for are consumer, automotive infotainment systems, and general embedded devices. To enable customers in each, Freescale created a series of premium reference designs called the Smart Application Blueprint for Rapid Engineering (SABRE) platforms. In the consumer space we have SABRE platforms for Tablets and eReaders. For the automotive segment it’s the SABRE platform for automotive infotainment.

These are highly capable designs that likely have everything you need and perhaps a bit more. For example, you can think of the tablet design as a feature-rich super tablet with more ports than you would ever need in a consumer device. What you’ll read about in the links above use the i.MX53, based on the ARM Cortex-A8 clocked up to 1.2GHz. The i.MX 6 platforms are being designed as I type and we’ll be posting information about them in the coming months. It is expected to have phenomenal IO capability: HDMI, PCIe, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, USB, SD, MIPI, PMIC integration… got an acronym?

For general embedded development, we have an inexpensive multipurpose board, the Quick Start board, that enables anyone to begin building real hardware and software platforms based on several i.MX processor families.

The software bundle

Now it gets really interesting (can you tell I have a software bias?) On top of all this hardware, you need software, lots of software. Package deal? You bet, but it’s mix and match and you get to choose. We provide good choices, not a Hobson’s choice. There is, of course, a board support package that enables all the peripherals for each processor. A good place to start looking for the software above the basic BSP package is at the i.MX tools page.

You can pick your operating system to align with your product and your market: Linux, Windows Embedded CE, Android, QNX. That’s quite a range of supported choices. Above that is a middleware layer of libraries and code designed for high performance graphics, power management, media streaming, and security/digital rights management. Video, radio, and audio streaming are standard capabilities expected for modern mobile devices.

There is, for some markets, critical end-user software that almost everyone relies upon. Flash from Adobe is a good example. Skype is another widely used communication utility. Either internally or with partners we ensure that these and other common, widely used software utilities and capabilities are highly optimized on our reference platforms.

And it keeps getting better. Two weeks after I first posted this article, we added a rapid user interface development tool for i.MX51 and i.MX53 processors, Inflexion from Mentor Embedded. By the way, Freescale is currently providing this tool and engine at no additional cost to i.MX51 and i.MX53 processors purchased after February 24, 2011.

The result: Enablement

What’s the end result of this package deal? Amazing power and flexibility. For example, let’s look at entertainment options. The i.MX 6 series can playback and record 3D videos in High Definition Blu-ray quality and snap family photos just as well as your digital camera. Its 200 MT/s capable tri-core 3D graphics architecture will paint your pictures, directions to your favorite restaurant, or your favorite game villain for you to blow up at liquid smooth frame rates. Want to interact with your tablet just by waving your hand? No problem… gesture recognition is a snap.

Putting together this package of software on top of the hardware, optimizing it and making sure it all works is not easy. So why do we do it? It’s simple, really. I’ve used the buzzword in other articles: enablement. That’s nice marketing speak, but it really means this: we do it so you don’t have to.

Technology is not easy. Shrink die size, increase processor speed, reduce latencies, add cores, add peripherals, add common middleware – the complexity grows and the sources of potential error grow exponentially. It makes perfect sense for us to build the solution and optimize the software bundle. For one thing, we’re designing the reference platform, and who knows the spec better? When it comes to optimizing middleware and common software resources, it is simple logic that it should be done once at the source, not many times by many customers. When it comes to your unique code, hey, that’s up to you.

However, I suspect you realize that there is a more powerful reason for this package idea, and that’s our mutual desire for profit. Without a platform, without software, it’s just a bunch of chips and you have an immense technical mountain to climb. The further up the slope on that Everest we can put you, the better off you are.

If we create a really sweet package, we add real value. We make your professional life easier. We make your time to market shorter, reduce your cost, make our silicon more valuable to you because, as it turns out, we are not a silicon company. We are a solution company. Silicon is the root of our solution.

That is the win-win of a real enablement strategy. That’s the package deal.