Marvell India Technology Day (MITD), held on 10th Nov 2009 is Marvell’s first effort in showcasing its might in landscaping in the Consumer Electronics and Communication domain.

In fact, this is the first program organized by Marvell to bring together its design partners and its own technological solutions under one roof. This assumes great significance after its acquisition of XScale Application processor line from Intel, which is immensely popular with design houses and end-customers in India. Intel slowly built customer base in India by conducting Intel Developer Forums and other events where the Embedded Xscale line was given adequate focus and that has proved to be successful. Now its Marvell’s turn take it forward to the next level.

The MITD 2009 had an appropriate tagline “Moving 3G Forward Faster”, given that world’s largest growing mobile phone market India is entering to 3G next year and 3G spectrum auctioning is scheduled in Jan 2010. Though Marvell does not manufacture chips or solutions involving the 3G modems, Marvell brings in other solutions that can enhance the 3G usability scenarios. Technology and Applications using that Technology have to grow in parallel. Just growing the technology alone, without proper Applications (utilizing that Technology), is not going to be fruitful and in fact not feasible beyond a point. Marvell understands this and concentrated on solutions that can enhance the 3G usability.

The first such solution was 3G Mobile Hot Spot reference design. Assume that you are organizing an outdoor management or board meeting, may be in the lawn of the hotel or a on the beach or so and you want to give an Internet access to all the participants. Imagine a small battery-powered handheld device with an integrated or pluggable 3G data modem and a WiFi access point.

Wouldn’t it be great for all the participants to get connected to this access point and get connected to the Internet through 3G backbone? Marvell displayed such reference design that costs USD99 (not sure of the volumes) excluding the 3G modem. Marvell also showcased a product that is already in the market using Marvell’s wireless chipset. The Marvell Mobile Hotspot (MMH, as they call) is basically a low-power, standard 802.11 Access Point implemented on a chip. They claim that this firmware based Access Point is requires 75% less MIPS, 50% less memory (from the host) compared to the SoftAP implementation.

According to Marvell, The SoftAP implementation relies on the host PC performing the AP functionality, while MMH implements the AP functionality in firmware. The MMH does have a limitation that up to 8 stations can be connected to it, beyond which the throughput drops below usability level. Large OEMs and even cell phone manufacturers can make use of this MMH for their products. Imagine Nokia or Samsung releases a 3G mobile with Access Point, using this MMH technology and that enables you to set up a make-shift wireless network on-the-go in minutes!!! Who knows that may be in the offing pretty soon. And Marvell prefers working closely with the very few large volume tier-1 customers rather working with a large number of mixed volume customers.

Marvell also demonstrated the single chip 802.11n solutions, which attracted us a lot. We, at e-con, use their hugely popular 88W8688 and 88W8686 WiFi/BT chipsets in our solutions. As a logical step, we were quite interested in their 802.11n solutions. Marvell offers 88W8786, a single-chip 802.11n 1×1 device capable of PHY rates and data rates of up to 150Mbps. Marvell claims that these chips are highly integrated, low power and low cost, in fact the price point is so attractive to upgrade the 802.11a/b/g installations to 802.11n. Marvell also demonstrated HD video streaming using their 802.11n chipset and also internet radio streaming over the Bluetooth co-existing. The 802.11n 3×3 solution (88W8366) supports 3 spatial streams with a 450Mbps PHY rate for best-in-class coverage. The 88W8366, an 802.11n 3×3 solution, enables high speed connectivity for rich multimedia experience. Marvell declared that solutions are production ready and supported with Linux drivers.

Another area Marvell concentrated was on the Plug computing using its GHz class Sheeva processors.  This Plug technology enables high-performance, in fact PC-class performance, always-on, always-connected, environment friendly computing readily available. The PC class performance from ARM core has been the buzzword of late, with TI OMAP35x and Freescale i.MX51 and Qualcomm SnapDragon, all eyeing for a bigger chunk in the Netbook business, dominated by Intel Atom. Marvell did not take that direct approach to that fiercely-competed Netbook market, rather combined the GHz Marvell Sheeva core with its Gigabit Ethernet technology at the power consumption of about 2watts to target a home computing market.

Marvell demonstrated the QDEO scaling technology and its application on Onida’s flat panel displays. The QDEO technology (which I believe, came to Marvell, as part of this acquisition of National Display Technology group) scales up incoming YouTube video (of much smaller resolution) to 1080p Full HD (1920×1080) resolution without any blocking artifacts. The QDEO technology takes advantage of some of the image/video properties of that particular frame, such as the dominant color in that frame,  etc., to make such a smooth scaling without visible blocks in the video. Marvell also demonstrated the Blyray player solutions and other optical reader solutions.

Another area of particular interest was ARMADA product line (that includes the PXA168 Aspen and Dove series of Application Processors) that is supposed to be the next successors of PXA3xx and PXA270 Applications Processors that Marvell acquired from Intel. E-con’s interest towards the PXA168 (codenamed Aspen) was very high during the Feb of this year (Feb 2009) when e-con wanted to design CPU modules based on PXA168 Aspen CPUs. Actually that was the time, when news about Aspen started reaching the media and everyone was excited about it. Originally designed for Digital Photo Frames, now, Marvell touts this as a general purpose Application Processor, as the Digital Photo Frame market burst this year after a rapid growth phase till the end of 2008. In fact Marvell developed on Digital Photo Frame Reference design called Teton based on PXA168 Aspen and also an Aspenite board (similar to Zylonite). Marvell told that the PXA168 Aspen chips shall be available for customers by Q1 of 2010.

Now Marvell supports and supplies the PXA168 chips only to tier-1 customers and they expect the software BSP/drivers to be ready for release to other customers by the end of Q1 2010. Marvell displayed the DPF reference design that can be used as Embedded Control Panel with full-fledged browser, multi-format video playback, eReader capability using EPD panels, Adobe Flash playback and rich GUI.

The only Intel product line that Marvell displayed was PXA900 series of Cellphone processors. Marvell particularly chose not to display PXQ270, PXA300, PXA310 or PXA320 CPUs on MITD, as they are originally from Intel and the only series from Intel that was displayed is PXA9xx. Marvell displayed TD-SCDMA mobile handset based on PXA920 for China Mobile and a 3G modem reference design based on PXA910.

On the whole, Marvell demonstrated its solutions that can move forward the 3G faster. Marvell also used this event to showcase its connectivity and Consumer Electronics solutions such as Qdeo processing solutions, Bluray Player using HD media processor SoC, etc. The Application Processors is an area where Marvell is concentrating a lot, but the results are yet to be seen!

3G Mobile · Intel Xscale · PXAx Processors · reference design · Windows CE · Windows Mobile