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Live from Orlando: Freescale's Technology Forum
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
On Monday, I arrived in Orlando to attend the Freescale Technology Forum Americas, where the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton Conference Center had been transformed into a Freescale Semiconductor facility for the next four days. Everything about this conference provided the attendee an opportunity to interact with the Freescale community, which includes universities, customers, and partnering companies. Many of these were populated by former Motorola or Freescale employees.
Even the badges for attendees were small circuit boards that could be turned on to produce a rotating billboard sign in small LEDs: "Freescale FTD 2008." Of course, since many of the attendees have engineering backgrounds, there was a contest to see who could design an application to use the FTF badge to produce an unusual read-out. A Blackberry-size Spotme provided a method for sending messages from one attendee to another, exchanging business cards, voting for favorite Technology Lab demos in a "People's Choice" event, voting for the best badge design, surveying all sessions attended, and to receive summaries of upcoming events. Much like the pocket protector or early cell phones, it had a sleeve with a clip for attachment to a belt. Needless to say, this was a technology-rich, really cool Forum.
The first day began with a series of presentations and panel discussions and ended with a reception in the Technology Lab. We played air hockey against a robot, which was embedded with algorithms to act in a mainly defensive mode. Nevertheless, most contestants lost to the robot. Most of the partners had posters and small demos; many were familiar firms: Digi-Key, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and others. Of course, there were autos of many types, from concept cars to actual racers that had microcontrollers and sensors to help systems run efficiently. University-based research sponsored automobiles as demos 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. A robot wheeled around between attendees as an ambassador of Freescale-sponsored robotics competition.
Freescale debuted the Flexis AC microcontroller family optimized for the large appliance market, the eight-core processor QorQ 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. The timing was right for innovations. Freescale is among the companies selected a finalist in the Advanced Packaging Magazine Awards (APAs). The winners of the APAs will be announced at SEMICON West in San Francisco on July 16, 2008, at the St. Regis Hotel at 6:30 p.m.
Rich Beyer, chairman and CEO, Freescale, welcomed the attendees. "Traditional market boundaries are beginning to blur, and it is important to gain insight into converging market segments," he said. FTF provided a unique opportunity to experience industry-leading embedded processing and connectivity solutions in many markets: automotive, consumer, industrial, mobile communications, medical, and networking applications. "Our goal at FTF is to provide an environment for inspiration and collaboration that will help unleash your imagination. We are here to help you solve your design challenges and make your business more competitive," he added. From the looks of things, FTF seems to be meeting these goals. For photos, videos, and highlights, visit www.freescale.com/ftf.
Gail Flower, editor-in-chief