Ron Martino, vp of applications processors, said there were three important elements to the new range. "Firstly, the choice of technology; These parts will be manufactured on a 28nm ultra low power process. Secondly, IP selection; the Cortex-A7 core is the most power efficient yet from ARM. And, finally, the device's low power architecture."
Freescale has launched two i.MX7 devices – the Solo and the Dual. Both feature a Cortex-M4 secondary CPU running at up to 266MHz and either one or two Cortex-A7 cores. In the Solo, the A7 is clocked at 800MHz, but the two A7s in the Dual can run at up to 1GHz.
"Freescale is the first company to offer an A7/M4 combo," Martino noted. "We have optimised dynamic and static power consumption and believe i.MX7 parts will consume one third of the power needed by an i.MX6 part with the same performance."
Martino added that the Cortex-A7 core consumes 100µW/MHz, while the Cortex-M4 draws 70µW/MHz. This translates to a performance of 15.7DMIPS/mW – three times better than that of the i.MX6 processor.
One of the features of i.MX7 will be the power saving modes. A Freescale architected suspend mode reduces power consumption to 250µW, with a 50ms wake up time. A deep suspend mode reduces power consumption by 'an order of magnitude', but Martino said this involves a trade off against latency.
Applications for i.MX7 processors are expected to range from e-readers and IoT devices to wearables, smart home controls and patient monitoring equipment.
Freescale has also developed a power management companion chip optimised for use with i.MX7 processors. The PF3000, made on a Freescale BiCMOS process, includes up to four buck converters, six linear regulators, a real time clock supply and a coin cell charger.
According to the company, the PF3000 is a fully integrated solution that not only optimises power delivery to the processor, but also to the peripherals and system memory resources.
It features one time programmable memory for controlling startup sequences and output voltages, while supporting a range of user programmable power modes.
