Freescale Semiconductor has unveiled a new gateway hub aimed squarely at the IoT markets, from home gateways to industrial and smart city installations. The $429 kit and accompanying SDK center around Freescale’s LS1021A processor, and has been designed in partnership with TechNexion – a frequent Taiwanese Freescale collaborator.
The LS1021A is an ARM-based processor, the latest addition to the QorIQ family, and represents a significant shift away from the Power architecture favored by Freescale in the past. The Layerscape architecture features a dual-core Cortex-A7 CPU, clocked at 1GHz. The chip supports error correcting (ECC) memory, extended security features, hardware virtualization, and “delivers outstanding performance at a typical power consumption of fewer than 3 watts,” according to Freescale – good news for power-conscious remote IoT deployments.
We spoke to the company’s Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Digital Networking division, Nicholas Sargologos, who answered our questions about the new chip – specifically, why the shift from Power to ARM, and why is there no wireless connectivity included as standard in the design.
Power (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC) architecture was originally designed by IBM, but it now a trademark of Power.org, the governing body that manages the reduced instruction set (RISC) family of processors and respective software. RISC allows, in broad strokes, designers to make a much more focused chip for specific applications – that would massively outperform the sort of general purpose CPU that you would find in a regular PC, which uses the complex instruction set computing (CISC) instruction set. The Power architecture is therefore renowned for its efficiency and performance, and is particularly prominent in supercomputers.
Sargologos explained that the Power Architecture is the most used platform in the communications industry, and is significantly more powerful than ARM. By offering an ARM flavor, Freescale has a chance to attract customers who have not adopted Power in their other products into its other product families – and vice versa to an extent.
ARM has a strong history in the mobile and embedded markets, which Power has historically been absent from. As such, there will be a whole host of companies that have gone their entire lives without using Power designs in their products – and these are potential new customers that Freescale might be able to entice into its ecosystem with the comfortably familiar Cortex-A7 based LS1021A.
As for the issue of no integrated wireless connectivity, a glaring omission for a home gateway on the face of it, Sargologos explained that it was simply a means of ensuring that developers are able to add only what they need and want to their designs – something that is made especially straightforward thanks to the range of I/O options on the reference PCB.
The board comes with 6 gigabit Ethernet ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out, a SD card slot, a full sized SATA 3 port, 2 mini-PCIe connectors, micro USB, K22 expansion options, 3 20 pin I/O ports, and perhaps most interestingly is a bracket for an Arduino shield. The Arduino compatibility makes the board rather unique, and lets developers take advantage of the vibrant and growing Arduino community to easily add wireless connectivity using something like Atmel’s WiFi Arduino shield that RIoT looked at two weeks ago.
But all these parts are optional, and can be left out of the final design according to spec. The reference design includes Freescale’s Kinetis K20 microcontroller, an audio codec and control area network PHYs, as well as the new MC34VR500 multi-output DC-DC converter for improved power management – according to Freescale. Sargologos added that these additional parts would improve Freescale’s sales if they were kept in the designs of their customers, as the whole kit is effectively modular and interchangeable during the design process.
Sargologos said this approach would take a developer 50-80% of the way towards a final design of a product, while massively reducing the R&D costs of those who opt for the LS1021A platform. He noted that Freescale wasn’t in the business of competing with its customers, and that it was allowing them to depopulate features as needed. For example, a home gateway likely doesn’t need 6 Ethernet ports, so they can be left out of the design in favor of a sleeker size and lower cost. Similarly, the design leaves space for those who might want to forgo USB, Ethernet and HDMI connectivity, in order to attach a cellular radio for an M2M product. The LS1021A board is meant to be a blank canvas to work on, and one that can be adapted to applications that range from the enterprise right down to the living room or smart city.
As Freescale’s VP of Digital Networking, Tareq Bustami, puts it “this newest IoT gateway underscores the advantages that Freescale’s comprehensive product portfolio offers to our customers. The QorIQ LS1021A’s sophisticated virtualization and security capabilities provide the kind of reliability that other IoT gateways just can’t deliver.”