Embedded Processor Watch

Editor: Jim Turley

In This Issue:

• Motorola and AMD Swap Process Technology, Macro Functions
• K7 Chip to Hit 1 GHz in 2000
• Fast RM7000 Processor Has Whopping 288K of Cache
• TI, Philips Cooperate on FireWire Silicon
• V3 Lends PCI and I20 to MIPS Chips
• Industry Resources: Holding Hands at the Forum
• Industry Resources: Embedded RTOS Sales to Hit $868M by 2002
• New Support Logic
• About Embedded Processor Watch

Motorola and AMD Swap Process Technology, Macro Functions

This morning at 10:00 Motorola and AMD announced an agreement to exchange technology that will make both companies more competitive in the embedded market. The agreement covers largely technical items, and does not involve swapping microprocessors, contrary to what some had predicted last week.

In a related announcement, AMD said it expects its forthcoming K7 microprocessor to reach speeds of 1 GHz less than two years from now.

The AMD/Motorola agreement covers four areas. They are:
1. Semiconductor process technology, including copper interconnect;
2. Flash memory design;
3. Network controller designs;
4. Broad patent cross-licensing.

AMD and Motorola will combine their expertise for next-generation semiconductor processes. The seven-year agreement covers 0.18-micron and 0.13-micron process geometries, with smaller feature sizes possible in the future. The agreement covers Motorola's "HyperMOS" process, as well as that company's copper-interconnect technology.

The two companies will pool their resources to further develop these processes, which will then be deployed by both companies. This will not result in identical, interchangeable, processes between Motorola and AMD, although their processes will be similar. The processes development will be carried out primarily at Motorola's MOS-13 APRDL (advanced process research and development laboratory) in Austin (Texas).

The second part of the agreement covers flash memories. AMD will share with Motorola its design for high-density flash memory cells, which both companies will use in integrated embedded controllers.

Motorola, of course, already has an embedded-flash design; the company has produced several 16-bit and 32-bit processors with flash memory on- chip, including the whopping PowerPC 555. AMD's flash memory, however, is generally regarded as superior to Motorola's, especially for larger memory arrays. Motorola says that future processors with on-chip (embedded) flash memory will use the AMD design rather than Motorola's existing design. Low-end parts with less flash memory will probably continue to use the Motorola flash design for many years. The design work will be carried out primarily at AMD's sub-micron development center in Sunnyvale (Calif.).

Third, AMD will license to Motorola several of its network-controller designs. AMD has a large portfolio of Ethernet controllers, which in some cases compete with Motorola's own network chips. The agreement covers both programmer-visible designs and low-level circuit designs at the physical-layer level. We expect this agreement will lead to new Motorola chips that are software-compatible with existing AMD Ethernet chips. It should also allow designers to use the same physical-layer (PHY) interfaces for future AMD and Motorola controllers.

Finally, the two firms signed a broad patent cross-license agreement that absolves either party from patent infringement suits from the other. Such agreements are common in the industry to help avoid nuisance lawsuits from unintentional patent infringement.

It is important to understand that such a patent cross-license does not impart access to a company's copyrights or other intellectual property. In particular, Motorola does not gain any rights to AMD's K6 or K7 microprocessor designs, apart from circuit-design minutia that might have been patented. Likewise, AMD has no access to PowerPC, ColdFire, or any other Motorola CPU architectures. The two companies will assuredly not be producing each other's microprocessors.

K7 Chip to Hit 1 GHz in 2000

As an interesting sidelight to this agreement, AMD said that its K7 microprocessor will hit 1-GHz (1,000-MHz) speeds in early 2000--less than two years from now. Such a chip would be the fastest x86-compatible processor (at least, in terms of raw clock speed) available, outstripping Intel's plans for its Deschutes, Covington, Mendocino, Tanner, and Katmai chips (see Microprocessor Report, 7/13/98, p. 1).

AMD said the first K7 chips will be produced in a 0.25-micron process, but that it expects its Dresden (Germany) plant to be producing 0.18- micron wafers--using the copper interconnect it gains from Motorola--by early in 2000. In the newer process, the company said K7 will run at 1 GHz.

Fast RM7000 Processor Has Whopping 288K of Cache

Part embedded chip and part workstation processor, the new RM7000 announced today from Santa Clara chip maker QED (http://www.qedinc.com) travels in fast company. The 300-MHz CPU stands up well against other desktop processors that have slipped into the embedded realm, such as the PowerPC 603e and 604e, and other MIPS processors. We expect it will be used in Cisco and others' networking equipment before the end of the year.

The RM7000 is one of the few microprocessors in any category to integrate both primary (L1) and secondary (L2) caches on the chip. The processor's primary 16K instruction and data caches are backed with a unified 256K secondary cache on the chip. An L3 cache controller is built in, for even more (external) cache, if desired.

Its two-way superscalar capability is the RM7000's biggest difference from previous QED parts. QED's RM5230, RM5260, and RM5270 can execute two instructions per clock, but only if one is an integer instruction and the other is a floating-point instruction. The RM7000's more useful configuration allows any two instructions to be dispatched together. QED's estimates put performance at 12-14 SPECint95 and 14-16 SPECfp95 (at 300 MHz), which is about the same as a 350-MHz PowerPC 604e. The more mundane Dhrystone rating comes in at around 500 MIPS at 300 MHz, although this is an estimate, too.

The RM7000 isn't cheap. Starting at $150 for the 200-MHz version, the price of the fastest, 300-MHz chip is--take a breath--$225. That works out to about $17 per SPECint95 and $15 per SPECfp95, versus $47/$55 for the 604e, or $47/$66 for Pentium II. This is the kind of trend embedded designers like to see, and its lends currency to the theory of trickle- down technology.

Hardware designers will be happy to learn that the RM7000 fits into the same socket as the RM5260 and RM5270 processors, so customers can reuse the same PCB layout and logic designs.

The PowerPC 604e can go toe-to-toe with the RM7000 on superscalar, floating-point, and bandwidth grounds, but at $500 and up for the faster versions, it gets pounded on price/performance.

NEC's newly-minted VR5464 (see Microprocessor Report 3/9/89, p. 1) is another close competitor. The VR5464 is cheap in comparison to the RM7000, at just $95. At 250 MHz, the NEC chip is $70 cheaper than the QED chip in the same speed grade. The VR5464 can dispatch two integer ops at once, or two FP ops at once. Just as important, the VR5464 has a vector-media unit, something none of its competitors has. The hang-up is its floating-point performance, which belongs in the same rank as Pentium's. Designers with a yen for image processing should choose NEC; for conventional floating-point code, the RM7000 is closer to the mark.

Fast transactions and big cache reserves: that's what the RM7000 offers. For makers of network boxes, QED is delivering the right combination of assets for growth. Compute-intensive applications might be better (or more economically) served by chips like the VR5464, but for moving data from Point A to Point B, with a little massaging in between, the RM7000 is right on the money.

TI, Philips Cooperate on FireWire Silicon

Philips Semiconductor and Texas Instruments have called a truce in their battle over IEEE-1394 (FireWire) physical-interface layer (PHY) interface chips. The two have agreed to develop and market pin- compatible PHY chips for 400-Mbps FireWire interfaces with two to six ports. The agreement also extends to faster devices (800-, 1,600-, and 3,200-Mbps) over the next several years.

The market for FireWire silicon has grown relatively slowly, as PC makers have been hesitant to add the costly interface in advance of widespread support from Microsoft. The same problem afflicted USB, which appeared, unused, on PC motherboards throughout most of 1997, all but ignored by Windows 95.

Windows 98 includes built-in support for FireWire, but this time customers have no hardware. Without DeviceBay or strong demand for digital video recorders, FireWire will not ignite until Intel includes the interface in its chip sets. Remarkably, Intel has now postponed that move until 2000, at the soonest, so it appears that FireWire will suffer from the same slow adoption rate as USB, although for the opposite reason.

V3 Lends PCI and I20 to MIPS Chips

V3 Semiconductor (http://www.vcubed.com) has a new device that integrates core-logic functions for 32-bit MIPS processors such as the R4300 and R4640. Like similar chips from Galileo (http://www.galileot.com) V3's new V320USC includes a synchronous DRAM controller, a PCI interface, byte-ordering conversion, and I2O- compatible messaging features. The chip also supports the current PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers' Group) hot-swap specification, so the chip may be used on CompactPCI boards.

At $27.50 in 10,000-piece quantities, the V320USC is priced well below Galileo's top-of-the line GT-64120, because it doesn't have a 64-bit bus to either PCI or the processor. The V3 chip is more similar to Galileo's GT-64111, a 32-bit device that sells for $24. That chip does not have the hot-swap or I2O features of the newer V320USC, however, making the V3 part better for RAID controller and plug-in cards. The fact that at least three companies (including NEC) are building support logic for MIPS chips underlines how successful that family has become in a range of networking and other commercial embedded applications.

Industry Resources: Holding Hands at the Forum

World Market Strategies is hosting its fourth annual Handheld and PDA Forum at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Denver. The three-day show runs August 19-21 and continues its focus on vertical applications in the utility industry, including field-automation problems, case studies, product demonstrations, and industry presentations.

Admission to the show runs from $35 for an exhibit-only pass to $795 for all the tutorials and sessions. For more information, or to register, contact WMS (San Francisco) at 415.641.2450 or visit http://www.pda- expo.com.

Industry Resources: Embedded RTOS Sales to Hit $868M by 2002

Such is the claim of Venture Development, publishers of a study with the descriptive title of "World Market for Embedded Software Development Tools and Real-Time Operating Systems." The study projects 18% compound annual growth in RTOS sales, starting from about $450 million this year.

Copies of the $4,495 report are available from VDC (Natick, Mass.) by calling 508.653.9000 or by stopping at the VDC Web site at http://www.vdc-corp.com.

New Support Logic

25LC640 (Microchip) Serial EEPROM has 64-Kbit capacity, SPI interface, small 8-lead package, 1.8-V supply, and 5-ms cycle time; also in 4K, 8K, 16K, and 32K capacities. Price: $0.75/1,000; Production: Now; Call Microchip at 602.786.7668.

HN58X2402, HN58X2464 (Hitachi) Serial EEPROMs have two-wire I2C interface, 400-kHz speed at 1.8 V, 2K ('02) or 64K ('64) density, and 8- lead packages. Price: $0.40/10,000; Production: Now; Call Hitachi at 800.285.1601.

TR28026CG (TriTech) Audio codec for notebook computers incorporates baseline AC97 functions; with 16-bit sigma-delta converters, 90-dB SNR, and 3.3-V supply. Price: $2.25/100,000; Production: Now; Call TriTech at 888.253.8900.

HL6321G (Hitachi) Red laser diodes for use in outdoor measurement equipment; 635-nm frequency, 15-mW output, in 9-mm sealed type-G package. Price: $130/1,000; Samples: Now, Production: 4Q98; Call Hitachi at 800.285.1601.

TPIC1310, TPIC43T01 (Texas Instruments) Three-phase DC brushless motor- controller chip set comes with EEPROM; does PLL digitally, using DSP filter algorithm. Price: $4/1,000; Production: Now; Call TI at 800.477.8924.