Super energy-efficient processors for intelligent home networks from Ismosys

Cavium Networks’ highly-integrated ECONA CNS3XXX processors feature a rich set of integrated hardware accelerators and a range of I/Os for glueless voice, video and data connectivity. Sophisticated power management techniques enable the devices to deliver super low-power operation starting at less than 1W. The devices target applications including FTTH broadband gateways, network attached storage appliances, multimedia picture frames, media and print servers, IP cameras and wireless access points.

At the heart of all ECONA CNS3XXX devices is an integrated Power Management Unit (PMU) that enables a total of six different power-saving modes during operation including; Wake-On-LAN support, dynamic control of CPU power per core, automatic shut down of non-operational logic. On-chip voltage regulators enhance the effectiveness of this PMU enabling power consumption figures ranging from under 1 watt for the single core version to less than 2.5 watts for the highest end dual-core version.

Devices in the Cavium ECONA CNS3XXX Family are built around high-performance ARM11 MPCore™ processors and caches including Superscalar, ARM11 MPCore™ processors operating at up to 700MHz, each with 32KB I-cache, 32KB D-cache and a large 256KB L2 cache to provide over 1400 Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS). Each ARM11 MPCore™ processor comes with instruction set extensions for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Media Processing, and integrates a Vector Floating Point unit (VFP) and Memory Management Unit (MMU). The cores also incorporate ARM’s advanced Jazelle™ technology that significantly enhances the performance of Java applets running on the CNS3XXX family. The high performance cores combined with large caches deliver non-blocking, wire-speed performance for voice, video and data applications. DSP extensions on the ARM11 MPCore™ processors drive enhanced voice applications including support for wideband codecs, DECT and advanced call control features such as conferencing.

Additional features of the new SoC processors include the industry’s most advanced acceleration engines, which include a packet switch for wire-speed switching; hardware-based NAT and QoS engine; TCP offload; Packet Processing Engine (PPE) for wire-speed packet processing; Content Inspection Engine for L7 application processing and filtering, RAID 5/6 XOR engine, 2D graphics engine with an integrated LCD controller, and a security engine for high-performance IPSec, SSL , Intrusion Prevention and Anti-Virus processing. The devices also support acceleration for the popular standards-compliant video codecs.

High-bandwidth, low-latency integrated Memory, System and Networking interfaces provided by the ECONA CNS3XXX family include intelligent x16/x32-bit, 800MHz DDR2 memory controller; three Ethernet MAC interfaces supporting RGMII/GMII/ MII, Dual USB2.0 / SATA2 / PCIe - all with integrated PHYs; TDM/PCM LCD interface; SDIO Camera Interface and a host of system interfaces including GPIO, SPI, UART, I2S and I2C.
Bandwidth for Internet access continues to increase relentlessly with high-performance wired and wireless access. Service providers and CE manufacturers are utilizing these high bandwidth links to enable services such as Video on Demand, VoIP, Video Conferencing, HD multimedia interactivity and 100Mbps to 1Gbps of data connectivity. Service Providers are already planning to deploy gateway-based services such as media storage, parental controls and premium technical support. According to Ismosys MD Nigel Watts, supporting these new services requires outstanding power-consumption together with high performance and programmable Internet-connected gateways and devices that are able to support processor-intensive tasks such as network packet processing, video and image processing, storage processing, wireless access and security: “The ECONA CNS3XXX family delivers these compute intensive tasks with an industry-leading performance / watt and performance / price combination”, Watts said.