Freescale intros first single-chip soln

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Freescale Semiconductor today announced that it has expanded its portfolio of Qorivva 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) built on the Power Architecture technology to power the next wave of automotive instrument cluster applications.

Freescale’s Qorivva MPC5645S MCU family builds on the popular MPC5606S family with additional advanced features such as high-quality digital graphics, dual displays and video input capabilities (for applications such as backup camera feeds), while supplying enough processing performance to efficiently display data from a variety of internal systems, said a press release.

In the past, the instrument cluster or dashboard in a car was simple, with several analog gauges to measure distance, speed, RPMs and fuel level. With today’s information requirements, providing detailed status display to the driver in an unambiguous way is a challenge due to space constraints.

“There currently is no other automotive-qualified solution on the market that provides this amount of integrated features for dashboard displays,” said Ray Cornyn, director of Freescale’s automotive MCU business.

He added that these parts integrate high-end graphics and analog functions for a true single-chip solution, which could help automakers shrink the system footprint and its power consumption.

In addition to providing a highly powerful platform, Freescale also provides a strong ecosystem based on the Qorivva family of products.