Last week at CES, Chumby demonstrated a WiFi-enabled digital photo frame (DPF) hardware-software reference design developed with Marvell Semiconductor. The reference design combines Marvell's recently announced PXA168 system-on-chip and 802.11 b/g WiFi chipset with Chumby's Linux-based "push" info-tainment stack and website.

Chumby radio
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The Marvell/Chumby reference design appears to be similar to another collaborative DPF design Chumby announced last week with Samsung, which is contributing its ARM11-based S3C6410 system-on-chip (SoC) to the picture-frame design. Like the Samsung collaboration, the Marvell design uses the same Linux-based software stack first used in Chumby's digital alarm clock. The Chumby device (pictured) began shipping last February for $180, and features hackable, open-source Linux software, and even hackable hardware and "outerware.

Like the Samsung-based DPF design, the Marvell design will offer access to Chumby services, content, and advertising. The Chumby Network offers over 1,000 Internet widget applications, including links to third-party content providers, as well as tens of thousands of Internet radio stations, say the companies.

PXA168 block diagram
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Announced last week, Marvell's PXA168 targets low-power devices that run Linux or Windows CE, and incorporate Internet connectivity, multimedia, and touchscreen interfaces. The SoC is based on Marvell's new "Sheeva" core technology, which is said to combine its previous Feroceon and XScale architectures, and is scalable beyond 1GHz. Providing full ARMv5TE and XScale compatibility, the SoC offers "extensive clock gating", and uses a low-voltage 65nm process, says the company. The PXA168 provides L1 and L2 caches of unspecified capacity, and offers a direct path to both LP-DDR1 and DDR2 memory clocked up to 533MHz.

The Marvell/Chumby DPF design will operate at 1GHz and will exploit the PXA168's built-in support for Adobe Flash Lite media playback technology, say the companies. The companies did not mention which Marvell WiFi b/g chipset was used in the reference design, which also appears to include components from SMK Electronics and Wolfson.

Marvell launches 802.11n chipset

Also last week, Marvell announced its 88W8786 single-stream 802.11n WiFi chipset, which is said to be designed for use in mainstream consumer devices. The 88W8786 chipset supports bit rates up to 150Mbps, as well supporting STBC and various aggregation schemes for increased range and robustness, says the company. Marvell did not state which operating systems it was supporting with the new WiFi chipset, but the company typically offers Linux support for its processors. The 88W8786 has been sampling since last summer, and should go into production later this quarter, says Marvell.

Availability

Neither Marvell or Chumby announced pricing or availability information on their joint DPF reference design.


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