Freescale MSC8154 Quad Core Digital Signal Processor
Freescale Semiconductor launched the quad-core MSC8154 digital signal processor (DSP). The MSC8154 is manufactured using 45-nm process technology and is pin- and code-compatible with the MSC8156 device. This enables designers to use the same board design for lower bandwidth macro- or micro-base station designs. Freescale is currently sampling the MSC8154, with general availability planned for October 2009. Housed in a 783-pin FC-PBGA package, it is offered at 1GHz core speeds. Suggested resale pricing is expected to start at $165 (USD) in 10K volumes.
Freescale MSC8154 Digital Signal Processor Features
- Four StarCore DSP SC3850 core subsystems operating at up to 1 GHz/8000 MMACS per core and up to 32000 MMACS per device
- Multi accelerator platform engine for baseband (MAPLE-B)
- High-speed, high-bandwidth CLASS fabric arbitrates between the DSP cores and other CLASS masters to M2 memory, M3 memory, DDR controllers, MAPLE-B and the configuration registers
- Two DDR controllers with up to 400 MHz clock (800 MHz data) rate and 32/64-bit DDR2/3 SDRAM data bus
- 32-channel DMA controller
- Dual RISC core QUICC Engine subsystem operating at up to 500 MHz
- HSSI that supports two 4x SerDes ports
- Four TDM interfaces
- UART and I2C interfaces
- Eight software watchdog timers
- Sixteen 16-bit timers and two 32-bit general purpose timers per core for RTOS support
- I/O interrupt concentrator and virtual interrupt support Eight hardware semaphores
- Thirty two GPIO ports multiplexed with interface signals and IRQ inputs
- Boot options: Ethernet, Serial RapidIO, I2C and SPI
- Three input clocks and five PLLs
- JTAG Test Access Port (TAP) and boundary scan architecture designed to comply with IEEE Std. 1149.1[TM] profiling and performance monitoring support
- Reduced power dissipation with Wait, Stop and Power Down low-power standby modes
- Optimized power management circuitry
- CMOS 45 nm SOI technology in 29 mm x 29 mm, 783 ball, FC-PBGA package
The MSC8154 dsp features four fully-programmable 1GHz DSP cores delivering 4GHz of DSP processing power. The device also includes the MAPLE-B multi-standard baseband specific accelerator. The SC3850 DSP core enables the MSC8154 to deliver up to 32 GMACS of 16-bit performance. The processor features high speed standard interfaces (Dual sRIO, Dual SGMII, Dual DDR-3 and PCI Express technologies) and large embedded multilevel memory with high speed DDR interfaces.
The MSC8154 DSP’s onboard Multi-Accelerator Platform Engine technology for baseband, called MAPLE-B, works in concert with the four DSP cores to support the 3G-LTE, TDD-LTE, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX standards, as well as the symbol rate functionality of HSPA+. Delivering multi-standard capabilities on a single platform eliminates the need to redesign hardware for different base station standards, so the device is scalable across macro-, micro- and pico-base station form factors.
More information: Freescale MSC8154 Quad Core Broadband Wireless Access DSP
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