The document provides an overview of the i.MX51 multimedia applications processor from Freescale, including its features, family members, and applications. The i.MX51 features an 800MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, integrated 2D and 3D graphics acceleration, and video processing. It supports HD video decode/encode and is suitable for applications requiring advanced user interfaces and video processing. The document describes the i.MX51 family members and evaluation kit and provides additional resources.
12. Evaluation Kit LCD Board Extension Board for keypad & camera module i.MX51 Ethernet USB ports USB UART DVI LVDS MMC/SD
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Welcome to the training module on i.MX51 Multimedia Applications Processors.
Welcome to the training module on i.MX51 Multimedia Applications Processors. This training module provides an overview of i.MX51 CPU complex, and introduces the multimedia features and functions of i.MX51.
The MCIMX51 processor, or i.MX51, is a member of the Freescale application processor family. The HD-capable i.MX51 family can be considered as a broad replacement for the popular ARM11-based i.MX31 line of applications processors. It is based on the ARM Cortex-A8 core operating at speeds as high as 800 MHz. 200 MHz DDR2 and mobile DDR DRAM clock rates are supported. The multimedia performance of the i.MX51 processor is boosted by integrated video processing unit. The 2-D and 3-D graphics processing enables the powerful graphics acceleration. The i.MX51, like all i.MX products, was designed and manufactured with Smart Speed in mind, where Smart Speed is the balance between performance and power consumption. The i.MX51 features many exciting enhancements that make it the ideal applications processor for mobile entertainment solutions. These highlights include increased security, powerful image processing, advanced power management, multimedia and graphics hardware acceleration, and enhanced connectivity.
mobile devices need to improve their power efficiency with each new product cycle. In order to accomplish this, Freescale has focused on improvements to the processor architecture that would allow more performance at same or less power consumption than before. Smart Speed technology is about finding the perfect balance between performance and power consumption. This is done through design techniques such as using dual voltage transistors, through architectural features such integrated cache, vector floating point co-processor and hardware accelerators, and then through power management advantages like dynamic voltage and frequency scaling and dynamic process temperature compensation. The i.MX51 works smarter and not harder by utilizing the CPU and specialized execution units in the most efficient way. Multiple levels of parallelism dramatically reduce the system cycles per instruction and system power.
The ARM Cortex A8™ Core Platform consists of the ARM Cortex A8™ processor and its essential sub-blocks. It contains the Level 2 Cache Controller, 32-Kbyte L1 instruction cache, 32-Kbyte L1 data cache, and a 256-Kbyte L2 cache. The platform also contains an Event Monitor and Debug modules. It also has a NEON co-processor with SIMD media processing architecture, register file with 32 x 64-bit general-purpose registers, an Integer execute pipeline (ALU, Shift, MAC), dual, single-precision floating point execute pipeline (FADD, FMUL), load/store and permute pipeline and a Non-Pipelined Vector Floating Point (VFP) co-processor (VFPv3).
The i.MX51 processor is optimized to support a variety of image and video applications. The graphics processing unit provides hardware acceleration for 2D and 3D graphics algorithms with sufficient processor power to run desk-top quality interactive graphics applications on displays up to HD720 resolution. It supports color representation up to 32 bits per pixel. The image Processing unit enables connectivity to displays and image sensors, relevant processing and synchronization. It supports two display ports and two camera ports. A high-performing video processing unit (VPU), which covers many SD-level video decoders and SD-level encoders as a multi-standard video codec engine as well as several important video processing such as rotation and mirroring.
These days 3D graphics for embedded devices have become more common and complex. The i.MX51 processor provides an integrated 3-D graphics processing unit that has been improved over the i.MX31. The 3-D graphics co-processor provides a rendering engine with an OpenGL® ES 2.0 hardware accelerator capable of 166 million pixels per second and 27 million triangles per second for realistic 3-D image shading. In addition, i.MX51 incorporates a 2-D graphics processing unit to accelerate 2D bitmap graphics operations, such as BitBlt, fill and raster operations, using a separate 2D graphics acceleration unit. The OpenVG 1.1 2-D hardware accelerator renders text, lines and images for applications such as scrolling text and maps.
The i.MX51 processor interface supports connection to all popular types of external memories: DDR2, Mobile DDR, NOR Flash, PSRAM, Cellular RAM, NAND Flash (MLC and SLC) and OneNAND. Designers seeking to provide products that deliver a rich multimedia experience find a full suite of on-chip peripherals: LCD controller and CMOS sensor interface, High-Speed USB On-The-Go with PHY, and three High-Speed USB hosts, multiple expansion card ports (High-Speed MMC/SDIO Host and others), 10/100 Ethernet controller, and a variety of other popular interfaces (PATA, UART, I2C, I2S serial audio, and SIM card, among others).
Security and security services, in an embedded or data processing platform, refer to the platform’s ability to provide mandatory and optional information protection services. Information in this context refers to all embedded data, both program store and data load. Therefore, a secure platform is intended to protect information/data from unauthorized access in the form of inspection (read), modification (write), or execution (use). The i.MX515 processor delivers hardware enabled security features that support secure e-commerce, digital rights management (DRM), information encryption, secure boot and secure software downloads.
The i.MX51 processors are targeted for consumer, industrial, and automotive markets. The consumer and industrial application processors include i.MX512, i.MX513 and i.MX514. The consumer version of the i.MX51 products are targeted to run at 800 MHz while the industrial versions run at 600 MHz. The i.MX514 and i.MX516 are the automotive oriented processors, which operate up to 600MHz. We summary the different features of the family members to ease you to select processors based on memory support, multimedia capabilities, target application, etc.
Smartbooks have larger screens than traditional smartphones and are easy-to-use devices for everyday online and multimedia activities. This design is based on our high-performance, low-power i.MX515 processor and features a seven-inch touchscreen with multimedia playback, long battery life, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth®, optional 3G cellular and optional ZigBee® RF4CE (Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics).
The i.MX51 evaluation kit allows customers to develop, debug and demonstrate their next great product without compromising performance. The i.MX51 Evaluation Kit has two optional add-on modules; an LCD and an expansion board. Based on a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 core, the i.MX51 Evaluation Kit delivers extreme performance and provides long battery life helping developers design products that meet today’s demands for energy efficiency. A range of connectivity options makes the i.MX51 Evaluation Kit suitable for developing many different types of user applications. The i.MX51 Evaluation Kit includes two SD cards: one pre-loaded with Linux and the other with Windows Embedded CE. Both options support a wide range of automotive, consumer, general embedded and industrial applications.
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