January 2015 – At CES Marvell was showing a number of their segment specific solutions – Hard disks and storage solutions, TV and communications chips, LED lighting drivers and controls and components for the mobile products industries. The centerpiece of the room was a new Home automation product that was the reference design containing most of their key technologies.
Designed as a reference for Set Top Box (STB), Over the Top (OTT), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Home/SMB Gateway marketplace the design utilizes most of the Marvell technologies in one product. The key to this catch all design is the unified SDK that incorporates all of the SDKs from the individual product lines into a single download kit. The contents of this “master” SDK is actually multiple product SDKs but it is available in one place.
The design is of a SMB/Home gateway that has the Marvell Armada multi-core processor as the heart of the system. The extension of the process core includes the Marvell 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFI host adapter, a Zigbee interface, 1Gb wired Ethernet, SATA3 (6Gbps) Serial Hard disk interface, video (HDMI) output, multi-channel audio and a web service agents. The video output is full 1080p 30fps.
The design supports both internal and external storage with the SATA interface and USB. For highest compatibility, the design supports IPv6 with an IPv4 mask for handshake on the connectivity. The Wifi is currently arranged in a 4x4 MIMO configuration.
The idea is not to sell this product, but instead, provide the design that has all working modules, and have the parts removed that are outside of the use base for the intended end product. The overall product line design supports web based agent and app development that will result in higher than current industry standard user automation. This is made possible by the single supplier solution and the intgratability of the software modules and application code for the resulting design. All of these modules are available now.