The New Engine Powering the IP Networking Revolution

Peer under the hood of a hybrid car and you’ll see two separate engines—a gasoline power plant supplemented by an electric motor, working in tandem to achieve optimal efficiency and performance.

Today’s communications processors share a similar hybrid architecture that combines a powerful processor core with a separate on-chip communications engine.

Case in point: Freescale’s industry-leading PowerQUICC® architecture - now celebrating 10 years in the marketplace - features a core, built on Power Architecture technology, that primarily takes care of control-plane processing. A separate RISC-based Communications Processor Module (CPM) works in concert with the CPU by handling peripheral processing tasks and multiple communications protocols, from ATM to Ethernet to HDLC.

The venerable CPM has been a mainstay of PowerQUICC architecture and the communications industry for more than a decade, serving the protocol handling needs for thousands of system designs driven by hundreds of Freescale customers worldwide.

As the next step in the evolution of the CPM, Freescale proudly offers QUICC Engine™ technology,

Like a CPM on Overdrive
QUICC Engine technology takes on the power of the CPM—and surpasses it by miles. It features two RISC engines instead of the CPM’s one, delivers up to four times the data throughput, scales up to 500 MHz (the CPM stopped at 333 MHz), and supports DDR memory and Gigabit Ethernet. While the CPM excels at Layer 2 applications, QUICC Engine technology supports Layer 3 and above processing to perform more sophisticated tasks, such as interworking, forwarding, switching and parsing. By handling these complex tasks, QUICC Engine technology frees the core to focus on what it was primarily designed to handle—control-plane processing.

All of these new QUICC Engine capabilities are essential for addressing the “3 Cs” of today’s communications marketplace: convergence, compatibility and cost. QUICC Engine technology is designed to help equipment manufacturers address network convergence to Internet Protocol (IP), provide compatibility across software platforms, and drive down the cost of next-generation wireline and wireless access equipment. .

QUICC Engine technology is a programmable system-on-chip (SoC) function block that accelerates communications protocols. It provides integrated multi-protocol processing and interworking at rates of up to 1.2 Gbps, enhancing overall system performance by offloading the companion processing core. QUICC Engine technology is compatible with the huge installed based of PowerQUICC processor-based software, thereby enabling equipment designers to reduce system cost by leveraging their existing code base.

To learn more about Freescale's PowerQUICC family and other communications processor products, please visit www.freescale.com/PowerQUICC.