原创 Equipped with new products, Freescale sees growth ahead

During a presentation at Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) held a few a weeks ago in San Antonio, Texas, Henri Richard, the company's chief sales and marketing officer, showed a slide listing eight of Freescale's core product brands: Qorivva automotive microcontrollers, QorIQ Qonverge base station processors, QorIQ network processing platforms, AirFast RF power ICs, Kinetis microcontrollers, Vybrid controllers, i.MX application processors and S12 MagniV mixed-signal automotive microcontrollers.

Other than i.MX, none of these brands existed prior to 2010, Richard said. (He added that i.MX has evolved so much since then that he really didn't consider it the same class of product).

Richard's point: after Freescale's tumultuous leveraged buyout by a group of private equity firms in 2006 and the heavy market undulations that began in late 2008, Freescale has spent the past few years focused on creating entire new product families across the markets it serves. Richard and other Freescale executives believe these products form the foundation of Freescale's mandate, articulated early and often by new President and CEO Gregg Lowe, to outgrow the broader semiconductor market and gain market share.

"The core of the [product] portfolio is completely transformed," Richard said. "I can't believe with the most competitive portfolio we have had in at least the last 10 to 15 years that we can't grow."

After several years intensive R&D focused on reinventing the company's product lines, Freescale now has the goods to compete and win sockets in places it had difficulty in before, according to Reza Kazerounian, general manager of Freescale's Automotive, Industrial and Multi-Market Solutions group. "Freescale is a turnaround story more than anything else."

Flurry of new product announcements
Predictably, Freescale used the occasion of FTF to unleash a flurry of product announcements, including the Xtrinsic 6-axis sensor, an addition to its QorIQ Qonverge base station IC line, two new QorIQ AMP series processors, the extension of its Vybrid controller portfolio into the automotive market and three new RF power amplifiers. Most significantly, however, the company also announced a set of SafeAssure solutions designed to help automakers comply with the International Standards Organization 26262 standard, said it is sampling the first of its Kinetis L series microntrollers built on the ARM Cortex-MO+ processor and introduced a core-agnostic architecture that will form the foundation of its third-generation QorIQ portfolio.

Tom Deitrich, general manager of Freescale's Networking and Multimedia Solutions group, described the Layerscape architecture as "software aware" and capable of utilising cores of different origins, including ARM and Power Architectures and conceivably others. Deitrich painted the architecture as part of a shifting emphasis within the semiconductor industry away from process technology towards the importance of architecture.

"It used to be all about process technology and number of transistors," Deitrich said. "Where the world is going is much more about the architecture and how you put things together."

But the biggest headlines from FTF were arguably around the Kinetis L microcontroller series, the first MCU to sample that feature the ultra-low-power Cortex-M0+ processor. The 32bit Kinetis L MCUs offer one-third the energy consumption of 8bit processors while delivering twice the performance of 16bit processors, according to the company.

During the opening day FTF keynote, Freescale did a live demo showing that the Kinetis L series MCUs used less power than low-power competitors from Renesas Electronics Corp. Microchip Technology Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. The that the Freescale parts proved the stingiest with energy was not that surprising, given the venue, but he margin of victory did raise a few eyebrows.

Will Strauss, principal analyst at Forward Concepts Inc., said competitors are nervous about the performance and momentum of Kinetis MCUs. "The Kintetis product lines have really become the team to beat in the microcontroller world," Strauss said.