45-nm Application Processor Drives Consumer Products

Built on the company’s 45-nm low-power CMOS process, the S5P6440 is an application processor designed for next-generation consumer electronics products such as personal navigation devices. Based on an ARM1176 CPU core which runs at clock speeds of either 533 MHz or 667 MHz clock speed, the processor’s CPU core and all on-chip hardware accelerators and peripheral interfaces are connected through a 64-bit AXI bus running at 166 MHz. This permits ample I/O bandwidth for handling the multiprocessing requirements in real-life applications. The S5P6440 features 2D graphics acceleration hardware that complies with the OpenVG application programming interface (API) standard, which enables advanced graphics functions such as alpha blending for transparency effects, anti-aliasing for sharper graphics, and vector graphics support for scaling without loss of image quality. To lower the system BOM cost and ease design complexity, the S5P6440 incorporates various interface hardware IP. Advanced NAND error-correction hardware supports current and next-generation MLC NAND flash devices; meanwhile, a DRAM memory controller supports both mobile DDR and DDR2 memory chips. In addition, the S5P6440 integrates a mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) display serial interface (DSI) for advanced graphics and display capabilities at low power. The processor supports all major high-level operating systems including WinCE and Linux. It is sampling now and is scheduled for volume shipment in the third quarter of 2009. The chip is housed in a 13x13 FBGA package with a ball pitch of 0.65 mm. SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO. LTD., Seoul, Korea. (408) 544-4000.