Hifn and Freescale Collaborate

Hifn and Freescale Semiconductor announced a collaborative effort that will enable both companies to further increase opportunities in the data storage market by jointly developing solutions that leverage the respective strengths of Hifn’s Applied Services Processors (ASPs) and card-level products, with Freescale’s industry-leading embedded processors based on Power Architecture technology.

The partnership brings together two industry leaders with uniquely symbiotic technologies that offer potential customers competitive advantages in performance, integration, time to market, energy efficiency and scalability. Freescale’s highly integrated PowerQUICC processors, which are used in a range of consumer and enterprise storage products where security, performance and power efficiency are paramount, complement Hifn’s ASPs and card-level products, which are employed by more than 75 percent of storage vendors to differentiate their products and speed time to market. Leveraging the combined advantages of these market-leading technologies can help customers develop storage products that consume far less power than traditional systems.

Hifn and Freescale plan to create storage reference designs as part of a comprehensive development platform that will enable storage OEMs and ODMs to rapidly bring their products to market. One of the first designs expected to result from the new partnership is a storage platform that combines the power efficiency and high-performance of Freescale’s MPC8641D storage processor with Hifn’s Express PCI-E cards for capacity optimization, creating a powerful design for a broad range of open storage applications, including disk-to-disk backup, virtual tape libraries, data de-duplication and continuous data protection.

“Collaborating with Hifn presents excellent opportunities to further expand our footprint in the storage market, which is an emerging growth market for Freescale,” said Henri Richard, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for Freescale. “As the volume of rich digital content continues to grow at work and at home, businesses and consumers need new technologies for storing, sharing and protecting their data. With this joint effort, we are enabling entirely new categories of storage systems designed to help consumers and businesses manage and secure their valuable content.”

“As a leader in the storage marketplace, we need to constantly evaluate opportunities that are going to help us not only maintain that position but to expand our market share as well,” said Albert E. Sisto, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Hifn. “There are tremendous growth opportunities in developing open system storage solutions with other technology leaders that have a symbiotic fit with our company. The combination of Hifn and Freescale is one such complementary fit in terms of technology, markets and customers.  This collaboration will enable both companies to provide customers with the platforms and solutions that will radically improve their cost, functionality and time to market.  We see tremendous opportunities for this exciting new relationship with Freescale.”

Freescale Semiconductor

Hifn