Freescale Semiconductor is expanding its ColdFire licensing program by offering its 32-bit V4 ColdFire core to the embedded community through IPextreme, a semiconductor technology licensing specialist. Working in collaboration with Freescale, IPextreme will now market, sell and support Freescale’s V1, V2 and V4 ColdFire cores to system-on-chip (SoC) designers seeking to integrate the cores and other functions onto single-chip ICs.

The V4 ColdFire core delivers exceptional performance - more than 500 MIPS - while maintaining a low cost and small size. Upward compatibility from V1 to V2 and V4 provides a smooth roadmap to higher performance designs, giving customers exceptional design flexibility. The V4 ColdFire core is ideal for compute-intensive consumer and industrial applications such as lighting control systems, environmental and building automation, access control panels and patient monitoring systems.

“This announcement underscores the success of the alliance between IPextreme and Freescale with respect to making the ColdFire architecture available to SoC designers around the globe,” said Warren Savage, CEO of IPextreme. “The ColdFire IP cores are among our most popular products due to their best in class area, code-density, and performance and are easy to use due to their high quality design, maturity, ease-of-integration, and vast ecosystem of development tools and software.”

“ColdFire remains one of the industry’s most extensive 32-bit development and support ecosystems,” said Jeff Bock, director of marketing for Industrial and Multi-market microcontrollers at Freescale. “The alliance with IPextreme is providing an exceptionally cost-effective entry point to ColdFire architectures that has allowed us to break into new markets.” 

IPextreme will market the synthesizable V4 to its ASIC and FPGA customers. The ColdFire MCU family is supported by world-class development tools, including the CodeWarrior software suite, the Tower rapid prototyping system and professional tools from Freescale’s third-party partners, helping customers eliminate months of development time while drastically reducing development costs.

Freescale launched the ColdFire licensing program in 2006 with the availability of its V2 ColdFire core through IPextreme and added V1 ColdFire in 2008 that included the availability of a free version of the core for Altera’s Cyclone III devices through IPextreme’s Core Store