New Freescale I.MX6 SoCs Include IoT-focused UltraLite 24
DeviceGuru writes: Freescale has announced three new versions of its popular i.MX6 SoCs, including new DualPlus and QuadPlus parts featuring enhanced GPUs and expanded memory support, and a new low-end, IoT focused 528MHz UltraLite SoC that integrates a more power-efficient, single-core ARM Cortex-A7 architecture. The UltraLite, which will be available in a tiny 9x9mm package, is claimed by Freescale to be the smallest and most energy-efficient ARM based SoC. It has a stripped-down WXGA interface but adds new security, tamper detection, and power management features. All the new Freescale i.MX6 SoCs are supported with Linux BSPs and evaluation kits.
How about non-BGA? (Score:2)
It's great that Freescale is making a version of the ultralite that's easier to manufacture - but it'd be even better if they had a non-BGA version. BGA means "ball grid array", and it's one of the more difficult component in terms of electronics assembly.
Some companies charge a 3x premium if there are any BGAs at all. Having version that has the pins on the side (QFP), even if it was huge, or had less functionality, would allow for easier prototyping and assembly.
There'd be a market for it.
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As much as I like prototyping, the chip has 289 pins. Prototype and assembly friendly for that much I/O would also mean an incredibly large package size and a huge amount of wasted space on the PCB.
You're flat out not going to get a non BGA version of this chip. Actually you're flat out not going to get a non BGA version of any of the i.MX series from Freescale given that this one has the lowest pin count of them all.
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That means it's not a very interesting new chip for us nerds on Slashdot. We can't get a sample tube of them and mess around and experiment.
Motorola (*cough* that's right. I meant Freescale) has always been good about evaluation hardware. Hopefully they make an easy to use EVA board with this chip.
What IoT monstrosity needs a chip with 289 pins, by the way? 289 pins of i/o is 'Ultralight'?
My new smart refrigerator is going to have 280 or so sensor nodes? (more, if it uses something more than the least Fr
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The phrase IoT has been bastardised to mean different things in different contexts. In my world IoT is being applied to hardware in ways that require a lot of complex sensing, communications, and internet software. One of the biggest "IoT" initiatives that ThysenKrupp and Microsoft like to rattle on about is a partnership which pulls some 80 different statistics for each elevator into the cloud for predictive maintenance purposes.
Not every IoT device needs to run a year off a small battery, be the size of a
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That means it's not a very interesting new chip for us nerds on Slashdot. We can't get a sample tube of them and mess around and experiment.
If you just want toy around with such a chip, making your own PCB almost definitely makes no sense. Get an EVA board, one of the many that will feature this chip, and use that. Hook up your own custom hardware with your own custom PCB to it using SPI, GPIO, I2C. Done. Trying to solder such a complex monster of a chip as well as the other chips you'll need (RAM etc) onto a eurocard PCB just doesn't make sense.
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OK, then give us QFP version with less pins.
I mean, Rockchip offers a competing range of SoCs in LQFP176, up to quad core, and they're huge sellers. Too bad that the Chinese companies typically won't talk to anyone.
Freescale would be smart to follow suit. If they did, they'd become a standard, quickly. I'd be happy to trade having gobs of GPIOs for cheaper and easier assembly.
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Less pins.... sure what functionality should we throw out?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Huh? This article is about an application processor (imx6), and you are comparing it to a cortex M microcontroller (PSOC series which is more equivalent to the freescale Kinetis series)
They are different things.
Freescale are offering 10 years guaranteed availability on much of their range, have great documentation, and have moved their build environment over to yocto.
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Get with the times. (Score:2)
A9 cores are old and slow.
Why not upgrade to A15 or A17?
BSP? (Score:2)
BSP? Why do vendors still insist on using that antiquated bullshit TLA? If your damn peripheral code isn't in the mainline tree, it probably sucks. Hooray for shoddy code developed by interns.
Wait, just about every SoC ARM kernel is built from a fork. Idiots.
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Related Links? (Score:1)
Somebody should drop a note to Freescale to let them know that at the bottom of the thread Slashdot made for their new SoC, Slashdot listed the following as 'Related Links'.
Those just seem like rather unrelated links. Haven't I seen Freescale display ads on Slashdot in the past? Do they kn
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GPU support is the main issue (Score:1)
I am using the i.MX6 inside the cubox-i from SolidRun. It works nicely and very stable as a home server with a standard linux distro (I use an unmodifie Debian 8.0). It has 2 USB ports, gigabit ethernet (which delivers around 500 MBit), and even an eSATA port. Also Openelec dirstibutes a nice image with Kodi for the (higher-end versions of the) Cubox-i.
My main painpoint is the lack of open source support for the GPU. This makes it pain to use it with a display and keyboard as very low power desktop. If that