One of the 'less aggressive' nodes is 28nm and Pete Hutton, president of ARM's product groups, says he is seeing a lot of designs staying at 28nm. "The 28nm node is cheap and mature," he said, "and there's still innovation happening; it's not a legacy node."
Some of the 300 licensees for Cortex-M cores will be targeting the 28nm node for their microcontrollers – Freescale, for one, has announced its ambitions – and ARM has responded with the creation of a design centre in Taiwan focused on M class cores.
But Cortex-M cores won't be used only in MCUs; they will find application in a range of devices aimed at the IoT.
ARM set its sights on the Internet of Things at an early stage and appears to be moving towards something of a platform offering. Recently, it has made a number of significant acquisitions, bringing specific technologies in house. Previously, the company would have left such things to its ecosystem.
It's all to do with growing complexity, at least in Hutton's opinion. "There are a lot of companies who know what they're talking about when it comes to the Iot," he said. "But there are a lot of companies coming into the market who don't understand what they are trying to do."
Hutton said it makes sense for the connection between the mbed OS, the host SoC and the RF part to be integrated. "It's quicker if you can do all this through components," he said, "but we will also be enabling ecosystem players."
IoT devices will need a range of functionality, but the bottom line is the silicon that enables them will have to be cheap and consume minimal amounts of power – and the 28nm node appears to be the way to go.
