Santa Clara, Calif. — Marvell Semiconductor Inc. has extended its ARMADA family of application processors with a sub-one watt device aimed at embedded enterprise applications in honor of Earth Day. The ARMADA 310 system-on-a-chip (SoC) is designed to deliver scalable performance of up to 1 GHz while consuming less than one watt.
Marvell said the ARMADA 310 will enable new greener embedded enterprise applications with gigahertz-class performance for digital homes and small and remote office applications, as well as for new intelligent solutions for Plug Computing, medical, financial and point-of-sale (POS) markets. The processor can be used in a variety of peripherals such as routers, microservers, dongles, PC cards, industrial and medical systems.
“Embedded application developers need smarter processors capable of delivering high levels of performance while consuming lower power, the new ARMADA 310 is designed to do just that – the solutions offers a variety of performance features while meeting the community’s demand to lower carbon footprint,” said Dr. Simon Milner, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Business Unit at Marvell, in a statement.
The ARMADA 310 offers scalable performance from 600 MHz to 1 GHz and the ability to power down as low as 70 0mW. To help maximize bandwidth, reduce power consumption and drive down system cost, the SoC features an on-chip 16-bit DDR2/3 interface. The highly integrated IC also drives down bill of material (BOM) costs by adding a wide variety of communications options including two PCI-express bus interfaces, two Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) MACs, a USB 2.0 compliant port with an integrated PHY that can serve as a peripheral or host, and an embedded 16-bit LCD controller, said Marvell.
The ARMv5TE compliant CPU core features a four-way, set-associative L1 16 KB I-cache /16-KB D-cache and a 256-KB, unified four-way, set-associative L2 cache. To maximize throughput, the chip uses an innovative on-chip crossbar architecture that enables concurrent transactions among multiple units, according to Marvell.
Other features include two SATA 2.0 ports with integrated PHYs, a variety of boot options (NAND Flash, DDR2/3, etc) and interfaces (including, SDIO/MMC, NAND flash, SPI, two TWSI, and two UARTs), a DMA/XOR engine with four channels, RTC and thermal sensor, and a network security engine capable of supporting various encryption algorithms
Availability: Available now in a 15 x 15-mm flip-chip ball grid array (FCBGA).
Pricing: Less than $15 in quantities of 10,000.