Live from Orlando: Freescale’s Technology Forum

07/01/2008

By Gail Flower, Editor-in-chief

ORLANDO, FL —Everything about the Freescale Technology Forum Americas conference, held June 16 & 17, at the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton Conference Center in Orlando, provided the attendee an opportunity to interact with the Freescale community. Even the badges for attendees were small circuit boards that produced a rotating billboard sign in small LEDs: “Freescale FTF – 2008”.

Rich Beyer, Chairman and CEO, Free-scale Semiconductor, Inc., welcomed the attendees. “Traditional market boundaries are beginning to blur, and it is important to gain insight in to converging market segments,” he said.

FTF provided a unique opportunity to experience industry-leading embedded processing and connectivity solutions markets such as automotive, consumer, industrial, mobile communications, medical, and networking applications.Monday began with a series of presentations and panel discussions and ended with a reception in the Technology Lab, a set up of posters and demonstrations from Freescale and many other partner sponsors. At the entrance you could play air hockey against a robot, which was mainly embedded with algorithms to act in a defensive mode. Partners such as Digi-Key, Cadence, and Mentor Graphics had posters and small demos. University-based research sponsored automobiles as demos also to show how fuel usage could be optimized through boards filled with advanced packages controlling the functions more efficiently in the average-Joe family mobile.

New product announcements from Freescale included the Flexis AC microcontroller family optimized for the large appliance market, the eight-core processor Q or IQ P4080 communications processor for performance and power efficiency of multicore processing, and three Power Architecture microcontrollers for addressing a broad range of cost-sensitive in-vehicle applications requiring 32-bit performance.

“Our goal at FTF is to provide an environment for inspiration and collaboration that will help unleash your imagination.” noted Beyer. Mission accomplished.