Motorola and its Metrowerks tools subsidiary jointly announced support for Motorola's DragonBall i.MX1 “applications processor” on Metrowerks' recently-announced OpenPDA platform, a family of software components, development tools, and related services for Linux-based mobile devices. The support comes in the form of an upcoming version of Metrowerks' “OpenPDA Development Studio” toolkit that will support the i.MX1 processor.

The software

According to Metrowerks, the OpenPDA Development Studio will include a pre-integrated board support package (BSP) for the i.MX1, complete with an enhanced Linux kernel, related drivers, and middleware and applications that have been optimized for system performance and reliability. The toolkit also features an intuitive GUI-based development environment (the Metrowerks Platform Creation Suite), which is designed to simplify configuration, development and deployment tasks, the company said.

Middleware and applications included in the OpenPDA support includes a multimedia player, games, voice recording, image viewer, synchronization, browsing (Opera), and Java JVM (esmertec Jeode), plus a full PIM suite (Trolltech Qtopia) that provides calendar, contacts, to-do list, email, and text editor programs.

The chip

Motorola's MC9328MX1 i.MX1 is based on a ARM920T CPU core along with an extensive set of integrated peripherals. On-chip controllers are provided for SDRAM, LCD interface, video port, dual UARTs, dual SPI ports, USB device port, I2C bus, general purpose I/O, and memory card interfaces. Here's a more detailed list of key features and specs of the i.MX1, which comes in a 256-pin MAPBGA package:

• ARM920T microprocessor core
  
• Memory management unit (MMU)
  
• 128KByte embedded SRAM
  
• Smartcard interface
  
• Bluetooth accelerator
  
• Analog signal processor
  
• AHB to IP bus interfaces
  
• External interface module
  
• SDRAM controller
  
• Clock generation and power control
  
• Two serial ports
  
• Two SPI ports
  
• Two general-purpose 32-bit counters/timers
  
• Watchdog timer
  
• Real-time clock/sampling timer
  
• LCD controller
  
• Pulse-width modulation controller
  
• USB device port
  
• SD/MMC card controller
  
• Memory Stick card controller
  
• DMA controller
  
• SSI/I2S interface
  
• I2C interface
  
• Video port
  
• General-purpose I/O ports
  
• Bootstrap mode
  
• Multimedia accelerator
  
• Power management features

Motorola said it targets its DragonBall i.MX family of “application processors” at smartphones, wireless PDAs, and other mobile wireless applications. (Incidentally, “MX” in the processor name stands for “Media Extensions”, and this processor is the first in Motorola's Dragonball i.MX family; hence the designation “i.MX1”.)

The i.MX1 runs at a 200 MHz clock rate. Motorola emphasizes that “it's not about the megaherz,” claiming that its 200 MHz i.MX processors can outperform much faster processors due to architectural advantages and built-in function accelerators; plus, lower clock rates are a big advantage in wireless mobile devices (longer battery life, less WLAN/WWAN signal interference, etc.).

In an i.MX technology whitepaper, Motorola claimed its i.MXL processor (similar to the i.MX1, but with a subset of the built-in functions) outperformed both Intel's Xscale PXA250 and TI s OMAP 1510 processors in a recent benchmarking study.

Availability

The Metrowerks OpenPDA Development Studio for Motorola i.MX1 is expected to be available in July 2003, the companies said.

 
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