Marvell SoC Boosts Digital Home Gateway, PC Performance

Marvell, a player in storage, communications and consumer silicon solutions, introduced its 88F6000 series, featuring Shiva embedded CPU Technology. These SoC devices bring low power, high performance application processing to next-generation digital home gateways to expand consumers’ entertainment and personal content choices by enabling video, audio and photos from multiple network and in-home sources to be distributed throughout the home.

In IP gateways, set-top boxes, home routers and media servers, the Marvell 88F6000 plays the role of a main or co-processor, offloading applications such as the graphical user interface and the Web browser from the primary video processor. Typically, these applications slow system performance, creating delays that detract from consumer enjoyment.

Consumers want instant access to high quality video, photos and other content from multiple sources distributed throughout the home,” said Dr. Paramesh Gopi, vice president and general manager, Embedded and Emerging business unit, Communications and Consumer business group. “The 88F6000 series excels by providing the processing power needed to handle multiple data rich applications simultaneously, while reducing power consumption and boosting system performance.”

The 88F6000 series with Shiva CPU Technology also adds Network Attached Storage (NAS) functionality to the standard Personal Computer architecture, enabling PCs operating in stand-by mode to continue performing network functions such as movie downloads and disk backup, while minimizing power consumption. The SoC, turns a standard PC into a NAS box, securely available over the network and internet. For business PC users, this capability enables convenient “down time” file backup, storage and sharing over the network. Consumer PC users, similarly, might download HD movies overnight.

The series with Shiva CPU Technology also excels as the primary processing unit in Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and similar small form factor personal computing devices where its high performance and low power consumption make it the ideal solution.

Marvell’s new SoCs will initially come in three versions, the 88F6180, 88F6192 and the 88F6281, with the 88F6281 capable at running of speeds up to 2GHz, while consuming an ultra-low sub 2W of power. Each device in the family comes with application software that speeds development and reduces time to market. The highly-integrated SoCs come with two serial ATA (SATA) ports, a USB port, a PCI Express (PCIe) port and an SDIO port among others. In addition, the new series is backward compatible with existing Marvell solutions.