Imagination at EE Live!
April 1, 2014, San Jose, CA—Imagination Technologies once again attended a show and introduced a host of new and updated products. The focus at the EE Live! Conference and Expo was on embedded products, especially wearables and IoT. For this sector of the embedded space, the key issues are in battery life, size, and performance.
A summary of the new releases includes the MIPS Warrior CPUs: a scalable family of CPUs including the new MIPS M-class M51xx cores, which include DSP engine, small code size, hardware virtualization support, and ultra-secure processing. This family of MCUs incorporate hardware virtualization. The low-power, real-time MIPS M-class M51xx cores form the first group of entry-level MIPS Series5 Warrior CPUs. Other parts of the family are the midrange I-class and the high-performance P-class processor cores.
As more and more devices are connected to the cloud and each other, security becomes an ever-growing concern. Imagination provides trusted execution environments, secure boot, secure code updates, key protection, device authentication and IP/transport layer data security to transmit data to the cloud. Virtualization and security features across the range of MIPS Series5 Warrior CPU cores enable robust security functions.
PowerVR GPUs: including the new PowerVR Rogue 6XE G6050, an OpenGL ES 3.0-compliant GPUs. PowerVR Series5 video processors (VPUs): for video intensive IoT applications such as security cameras or wearable devices such as smart glasses. PowerVR Raptor imaging processor cores: scalable solutions to form a complete, integrated vision platform that saves power and bandwidth for today’s camera applications and other smart sensors
Ensigma Series4 Explorer radio communications processors (RPUs):a global connectivity and broadcast communications functions including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE (low Energy). FlowCloud: an application-independent technology platform for emerging IoT and cloud-connected devices that enables rapid construction and management of device-to-device and device-to-cloud applications. Caskeid: for accurate, synchronized wireless multiroom connected audio streaming for audiophile-quality stereo playback with less than 25µs synchronization accuracy. And Codescape: a debug solution that supports the full range of MIPS CPUs, offers Linux and RTOS awareness features, and provides heterogeneous debug of SoCs using one or more MIPS and Ensigma processors
To put all these IP together, they also noted partnerships with the AllSeen Alliance, and key partners including Google, Ineda, Ingenic, Microchip Technology and others, who are building the silicon platforms for the various applications platforms. Ingenic Semiconductor has a MIPS-based IoT development platform “Newton” which integrates CPU, Flash, LPDDR, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, PMU and various sensors on a single board around the size of an SD card.
Other development boards for MIPS include those for Microchip Technology’s 32-bit PIC32MZ MCUs and a new a complete low-cost MIPS-based Android and Linux platform for system developers. Comprehensive development tools for all MIPS CPUs, include the GNU tools for Linux and bare-metal embedded systems from Mentor Graphics’ Sourcery CodeBench, Imperas’ high-speed instruction-accurate OVP models, and QuantumLeap parallel simulation acceleration technology.
See: www.imgtec.com
