
Creating Performance with Stamina for Wireless Communications White Paper, Rev. 2
2
Freescale Semiconductor
Long battery life is important because a business day is not a sprint. It’s a marathon of communication.
High performance smartphones and wireless PDAs should not be accompanied with a pocketful of
batteries. Future generations of wireless hand held communication devices must strike a high level balance
between performance and stamina (long battery life), which is a particular strength of Motorola’s i.MX
family of application processors based on ARM
technology.
The i.MX family of embedded application processors offers a leap in performance and integration from
earlier DragonBall processor products. The i.MX family helps cut the time it takes to perform the tasks
required while at the same time helps to extend the time you have to get more work done. To achieve this
difficult combination, i.MX products are being developed with two overriding priorities:
Performance—
The ability to support a broad range of demanding applications in a mobile environment.
Stamina—
Increased battery life means more production, more entertainment, and the satisfaction that you
are getting the most out of new technology.
The i.MX family of application processors based on ARM technology is designed for smartphone
technology, wireless PDAs, and other mobile wireless applications. With the rapid advent of new and
powerful wireless services for very small, hand held devices—broadband Internet access, video capture,
live video streaming, etc.—it’s imperative that we offer our users the hardware and software that can
quickly process these new services. It is also our responsibility to push the limits of power management,
because, as will be explained later in this paper, battery technology will never catch up to us and can’t bail
us out of this dilemma.
What differentiates the i.MX is its level of feature integration around an industry standard ARM core
processor. The first member of the i.MX family, the i.MX1, is an ideal combination of price, performance,
and low power consumption. It is engineered with the power and stamina expected to handle the ever more
complex system requirements of the newest handheld devices, delivering fast access for long periods of
time.
Future generations of the i.MX family will incorporate advanced floating-point technology in hardware.
Floating point is designed to not only boost the performance of such advanced features as MPEG4 and 3-D
graphics, it is engineered to refine the appearance of all graphic displays, including the appearance of text
fonts.
We already know that as processor performance goes up, battery life goes down, so we have to use more
efficient software and sophisticated semiconductor process technology to give our DragonBall application
processor products more stamina, to close the gap between performance and battery life. Such design
techniques as selective hardware acceleration, dynamic frequency control, direct memory access channels,
and clock gating all add to the overall efficiency of i.MX, providing more work from less energy.
Motorola’s architectural license allows us to make architectural enhancements to the ARM core. However,
we have chosen not to add any proprietary modifications in order to help ensure that customers maintain
software compatibility between ARM architectures and the ability to use standard development tools.
Instead, we work very closely with ARM Ltd. to help make their processor a more efficient core for our
i.MX application processor. This means that customers who purchase the i.MX know they have at its heart
a processor that is engineered to be 100% compatible with the industry standard ARM instruction set and
architecture, and that they don’t have to worry about code compatibility.