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Freescale Semiconductor's MPC8544E is the newest member of its PowerQUICC III family. It was designed to address a growing demand for advanced interconnect technologies and low-power consumption in high-performance applications.

The processor is well suited for network routers, imaging systems, wireless access points and video-surveillance equipment.

This processor incorporates SGMII interfaces and three multilane PCI Express ports. In addition, the MPC8544E is said to be one of the industry's lowest power-consumption system-on-chips (SoCs) to deliver Gigabit performance, consuming only 3.75 W, typical, of core power when operating in the gigahertz frequency range. This greatly reduces the challenges of thermal management in embedded applications that do not employ forced air.

The MPC8544E processor is a flexible SoC platform with an e500v2 core and a large 256KB L2 cache. The device provides a wide range of high-speed connectivity including two integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet controllers with SGMII interfaces and three PCI Express ports. Onboard hardware acceleration engines include double precision, floating point, signal-processing engine, TCP offload — as well as Freescale's security acceleration engine. The device operates at extended industrial temperature ranges from -40 degrees Celsius to 105 degrees Celsius.

The MPC8544 without encryption and the MPC8544E with encryption are manufactured with 90 nm process technology and are offered in a 783-pin PBGA package. Samples of the MPC8544 and MPC8544E are expected to become available in the second quarter of 2007 with production to commence in the fourth quarter of this year. Suggested resale pricing for the 1 GHz MPC8544E processor starts at $90.71 in 10K unit quantities.