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.
